Rosh Hashannah 5771: Alone Together

Shana tova,

A rabbi colleague of mine was once on a lecture circuit when he found himself in a Denver hotel. He had missed his connecting flight and was tired. He lay down on the bed and began flipping through the only reading material nearby, a Gideon’s Bible in the drawer by the bed.

Pasted in the front cover, he was surprised to find a detailed index of how to use the Bible. If you are depressed, read Psalm 19. If you’re drunk, read Psalm 38. If you’re lonely, read Psalm 23. Well, all alone, far from his family, he opened to those famous words of comfort: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” He read the Psalm slowly with kavana, great intent. Then, just as he was about to close the book, he saw a note at the bottom of the page, “If you’re still lonely, call Lola.”

Most of us devote great time and energy to overcome loneliness. We make friends, marry, and join groups. Some people respond to their loneliness by filling their lives with stuff or with Lolas only to find them still empty. We do all of this and more because our souls long to move from separation to connection, from loneliness to loving.

This truth is reflected already in the very beginning of the Torah in the description of creation. After looking out over creation, God proclaimed each day “tov” good. The first thing about which the Torah says “lo tov, it is not good,” is loneliness. “Lo tov hayot adam l’vado. It is not good to be alone.” Millennia later, we are no different than Adam who sought companionship and found it in Eve. Singles searching for a partner in life know this. Widows and widowers making dinner for one know this first hand. Sometimes even in a crowded room, we feel alone.

Now I know everyone needs some “alone-time.” But most of the time, we prefer to share our lives with others. Some of you enjoy going to the Boundary Waters where you count how many days you go without seeing anyone else. But I’ve never heard anyone say they made the trip to be alone. They experienced the area’s quiet solitude of being alone, with others.

A well known story about another rabbinic colleague of mine drives home this message. Once, there was rabbi who loved golf more than just about anything. (BTW, I’m not talking about Rabbi Kahn.) He was so addicted that on YK of all days, he snuck out to the fairway before shul. It was a glorious day; he was alone on the vast green. He set aside his guilt and teed up. Well, the angels in heaven did not approve of this sacrilege. “Watch this,” one said. The rabbi swung; the ball flew and fell divinely right into the hole.

The other angels were enraged. What are you doing giving this heretic a hole-in-one? With a twinkle in his eye the angel responded, “who’s he gonna tell?”

The joke describes an experience we have all had: when we know great joy or sorrow, we crave to share it with others. After the death of a loved one, we long to pick up the phone to tell them the news. When our child says his first word, when we get that promotion at work, when we hit the winning run, we immediately reach out to others.

As humans we crave connection. Our souls long for it. A soon to be released study, however, questions our success at achieving deep, lasting relationships. A book by MIT professor Shery Turkle called “Alone Together” examines the effects of technology on social development.

Have you ever gone out with a friend for coffee and the friend spent half the time on her cell phone texting? You didn’t bring anything to read, so you sat in the café reading the menu over and over. We might describe that experience as “Alone Together.” But there is more to it than friends addicted to their PDAs.

“Alone Together” refers to the illusion of companionship we create by amassing hundreds of Facebook “friends.” It refers to those times when we text not because it is faster and more efficient but because it is less risky, because speaking face to face is too hard or involved. It refers to the sense that while we may be more connected than ever we have fewer meaningful relationships.

Turkle explains it this way: “we are increasingly becoming a society in which our persona are externally manufactured rather than internally developed. On Twitter you are creating something for others’ consumption and so you find yourself playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be revealing something of your true self become a performance.”

Now don’t get me wrong. Clearly, technology has been a blessing. I mean, where would I be right now without sermons.com? No really, on-line we can connect with long-lost friends. Instant communication allows us to reach out to those in earthquake ravaged lands and show them we care. And I can’t count the number of weddings I have preformed thanks to websites such as JDate. But there is a way in which some virtual relationships remain as thin as the screens on which we write.

We all enjoy the convenience of connecting at the click of a button. But the very ease of access can actually disconnect us from the real, necessary and sometimes messy work of building relationships. It is no wonder, writes one author, that the sum of our modern equation is: Community decline + Facebook + loneliness + 80-hour-work weeks+ the Great Recession= RentAFriend.com. This, by the way, is a real website, not for a dating service or for contacting Lolas. Instead, in their own words it allows you to “hire a friend to show you around town, teach you a new hobby or just someone for companionship.” Those experiences used to happen naturally and organically within community. Now apparently they are available on-line and at a discount.

If society is increasingly living “Alone Together,” where can we go to be “Together, Together?”

At its heart, a synagogue is about overcoming loneliness. It is a place for real, not virtual connections. It is a place where you can come and unplug, where you can turn off your cell phone and still have a network. In fact, we ask you and sometimes remind you to turn off your cell phone.

In this way, synagogues are really counter cultural. They operate in contrast to social trends and to the prevailing social ethic. The traditional American ideal was always of a rugged individual, a rebel, making his way in the world, unencumbered by fences or borders. Today, the cowboy image has been replaced by an entrepreneur who offices alone, who listens to his iPod, calendars on his Iphone and works on his Ipad. For an ancient tradition that cherishes community, this perspective poses a tremendous challenge.

It didn’t used to be this way. When people lived on the North Side, the sense of community was palpable. Even if you were not a regular shul goer, you saw people in school and in the market. Your lives were naturally interwoven with others.

Today, we no longer all live in the same neighborhood. We don’t shop or study together. So naturally, some of that sense of community has diminished. But the desire to be “Together, Together” remains: Maybe you are new to town and want to meet some people. Maybe you are starting a family and want to raise your children within the embrace of a Jewish community. Maybe your children have left home and you are looking to reconnect. Or maybe you or your parent is a senior citizen in search of companionship.

In these and in many other examples, we can move from “Alone Together” to “Together Together?” And the answer is obvious but it does take effort. It is mitzvah.

Ok, I can see some of you rolling your eyes and saying, “Here goes that Rabbi Davis, always trying to get us to do Jewish stuff.” Well, yes that’s true. But hear me out. Mizvah means connection. It really it does.

You have probably heard me say to a 13 year old, mitzvah is not just a good deed. Mitzvah means commandment. But that’s only half the story. This is what we didn’t tell you at your bar and bat mitzvah. The word tzav at the root of “mitzvah” means, “to join together.” That is why occasionally you’ll read in Torah or a siddur a translation such as, “Keep these words that I enjoin upon you today.” Mitzvot are about joining together. The same, by the way, is true in English. “Religion” comes from the Latin word ligio which forms the root of the word “ligament.” Religion and for Jews “mitzvah” is the connecting tissue of our lives that binds us to each other and across the generations. It binds us to our people and our history. It binds us to God.

It’s easy to understand why. Mitzvot provide a set of common practices and common language that are the building blocks of community. When there are days we share, books we read, foods we eat and avoid eating, rituals we perform, words we pray and on and on, we feel the ties forming.

So I want to invite you, I want to ask you, I want to challenge you to get connected. Get connected using our people’s DSL, Designated Spiritual Line called mitzvah, a holy ligament that binds you to each other and to God.

We have 613 mitzvot to choose from but I’ve got a deal for you- all I am suggesting is one, one additional mitzvah. One mitzvah, once a month. Do you think that celebrating Shabbat, visiting the sick, attending minyan, separating milk and meat, studying Torah will make you feel more connected? I guarantee you they will. Attending an Israel lecture, cooking a shiva meal, opening your home- these are also mitzvot. And they don’t just connect us, they deepen us; they deepen our relationships and touch our soul.

“The fun of Twitter and its draw for millions of people,” Turkle speculates, “is its infinite potential for connection. But when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy?”

The answer, I would say, is not to go permanently off-line but to build a vital Jewish community in the midst of our virtual lives. Because a Shabbat shared in cyber space will never be a substitute for sitting around your dining room with friends; because a virtual hug can never replace a shiva visit.

In the face bytes and bites, we seek a place of reflection where we can be real, where we don’t have to perform or pretend. In an era when quality is measured in pixels on an LCD, we seek a place of intimacy where conversations happen face to face. In the face of instant messaging, we seek time to consider the words of our mahzor “ma anu, me haeynu, what am I, what is my life?” Who is this I inside of me?

At their best, synagogues are sacred communities, places where life’s joys are heightened and its sorrows soothed by the embrace of others. They are places where we feel grounded, where a scroll is not a button on a keyboard but a story with a timeless message, where cookies are not a tracking system but finger food at kiddush, where memory is not housed in a hard drive but in the contours of our hearts, where kindle is what you do to illumine your home with the light of Shabbat, where Facebook means seeing our faces in God’s Book of Life. A synagogue community is the place we come to deepen bonds that tie us together and that connect us to our ancestors, to our grandchildren and to God. It is where my “I” connects with the Divine Anochi, where MySpace exists in OurSpace, which is part of God’s Space who dwells in myspace. And the key is mitzvah.

Now I have a feeling that some people may be thinking to themselves, “I understand how mitzvot promote the warm feelings of “Together Together.” But truthfully in my case, it’s unnecessary. I have my friends. I have a social circle and a support system. I am “Together Together” with them.”

Here I will respond as some of you have heard me say in the past: Let’s not confuse terms. Friendships are special and important but they are not identical with community. We are not a community for community sake. We are not a shul to be a shadchan, to just make matches. For that, you can log on to rent-a-friend.com.

As community, unlike a circle of friends or havura, we have been entrusted with a sacred mission: inspired by Jewish values, a community encourages members to grow in wisdom and to live in ways that make a difference in our lives and in our world. To do so, we must guard our tradition and transmit our sacred inheritance to a new generation. Put simply, more than just developing friendships, a Jewish community exists to mobilize Jews to do God’s work.

That is the message of a phrase in our musaf amida on these Highholy Days. V’yaasu aguda ahat laasot ritzoncha b’levav shelem. At tomorrow’s drash service we will consider the second half of this phrase, lev shaelm, having a whole heart. But today it is the first half that interests me. Vaasu agudah ahat. Bind us together that we might be of service to You, God.

This phrase, vaasu agudah ahat calling us to be united for a common cause appears most famously in a relation to the lulav and etrog we gather together on Sukkot. In an intriguing midrash, the rabbis teach that the four species represent four kinds of Jews. They were not referring to Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist and Reform Jews but to Jews who are more active and less active, more and learned and less learned. “I cannot bear to loose any of them,” God says. “Therefore, bind them in an agudah ahat, a singular bundle v’hen m’kaprin elu al elu, and they will atone for each other.”

This midrash leads to a number of remarkable conclusions. First, while each of us is precious in God’s eye, none of us no matter how active or learned is perfect. That is why God calls on us to do kapara, to atone for each other. In other words, we are responsible for our own shortcomings and those of the entire community. We do so not by passing judgments on others but by responding when a communal need or weakness is identified.

Second, the midrash underscores the fact that we are interdependent. Elu m’kaprim al elu means each of us possess something others lack; each of us lacks something the others have. You contribute what I can’t. I contribute what you can’t. That is the power of community. Each of us has something to offer. Even the seemingly uninvolved Jew who in the words of the midrash posses neither torah nor maasim tovim, neither learning nor good deeds, contributes to the community and so should not be left behind or excluded. She too can atone for others by expressing her commitment to the vision of “Together Together”: “I may not have the learning and I don’t always follow Jewish practice,” she says, “But I want to be tied up amongst the community.”

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the midrash teaches and Jewish law affirms, each of us is needed. So central is this teaching that if just one species is missing the entire bundle is not kosher and cannot be used fulfill the mitzvah on Sukkot. If the community is incomplete, we cannot be agudah ahat.

Despite appearances, this is not an early sukkah message. In the Hasidic tradition we are taught, on Rosh Hashanah the shofar calls out- this is the time to be bound into one bundle, asu aguda ahat. Sukkot with its lulav and etrog reminds us elu m’kaprim al elu, we can atone for each other. We do so when acknowledging our interdependence, we admit our deficiencies; recognize our ability to contribute and when we strive to make a difference in the life of our community.

This vision of “Together Together” I’ve described for our community applies equally to our families and our world. In the words of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber found in our new mazorim, “the purpose of creation is not separation or division. Humanity is meant to become a single body. Our purpose is the great upbuilding of unity and peace. And when all nations are bound together in one association living in justice and righteousness, they atone for reach other.”

Whether we Skype or type, whether we use email or snail mail, each of us can help make our families, our community and our world an agudah ahat, a place where we feel together, truly together. In this coming year, let us strive to use technology wisely to deepen existing relationships and develop new ones. But more than that, let us turn to our people’s sacred, social networking platform by doing just one more mitzvah. For we know, mitzvah means connection. And when we increase the mitzvot in our lives, we move from separation to unification, from loneliness to loving as we feel closer to each other and to God.

Many years ago, Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis wrote a poem aptly called “Alone Together.” I’ll leave you with his words: “Alone we are mortal, together immortal. For a community does not die.”

Shanna tova.