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Erev Rosh Hashana Sermon 2017
Through Our Own Eyes Jeffrey A. Summit

I often tell students who are stressed or under pressure: “don’t be so hard on yourself.” But that’s not the message I want to share tonight, as we start the essential work of Rosh HaShana, really thinking about who you are and who you most want to be as this new year stretches out before us. My message is: if there are changes you want to make in your life, then be appropriately hard on yourself, be thoughtfully self-critical as you consider how you can do a better job: with your friends, with your family, in your community. It is hard to be thoughtfully self-critical and there are many pitfalls to avoid as we engage as try to figure out how we want to change. This evening I want to explore one of those pitfalls: the tendency to assess ourselves by looking at ourselves through the eyes of others.

I want to begin by telling you a story that I learned from my friend and teacher Rabbi Dick Israel, alav hashalom. Dick told me that it was a true story. He said that this happened when he was a young rabbi and he decided to do something adventurous so he went off and became the chief rabbi of India. Now, their Jewish community is very small and he was the only rabbi in India, so that probably automatically made him chief rabbi, but none the less, this story happened at the beginning of his stay in Bombay when his guide and translator was taking him around to be introduced to various community groups. It so happened that when people heard that a rabbi, a spiritual leader, from America was coming, hundreds and hundreds of people turned out to welcome him. The mayor gave a speech and children sang a welcome song and then Dick’s translator stood and said in English, and then in Hindi, thank you so much for your warm welcome and now the esteemed Rabbi Israel, a famous rabbi from America, had a speech to share with the assembly. Now, Dick, who at that point had just finished rabbinic school and was hardly famous, thought he was just there to be welcomed and say hello and he had no speech whatsoever prepared and there were hundreds of people gathered before him.

He said, it felt like that nightmare, that dream where you go up to the podium and all of a sudden, you realize that somehow you forgot to get dressed that morning and you’re standing in your underwear. So, he walks to the podium praying for something, anything, a little inspiration and he sort of muddles through a speech on loving your neighbor and inter-cultural cooperation. Dick said, the speech did not feel like a high point in his speaking career. But, when he’s done, hundreds of people jump to their feet and cheer and clap and they keep clapping and Dick sits down amazed and thrilled that he has pulled this off. Wow! I guess I did better than I thought! Then his translator goes to the podium says a few sentences in Hindi and sits down and Dick leans over and asks, “What did you just tell them?” The translator answers, “Oh, I told them that in your speech, you said that you were very happy to be here. I needed to translate because no one in this village speaks a word of English.”

There are many problems when we judge ourselves through the eyes of others. First, our assessments are often not accurate. We often misread people, not only people from different cultures, even people who are part of our own community. We say something in a class or a meeting and the person on the other side of the table looks bored or upset we’re so self-centered that we think they’re reacting to us or they think that our comment was stupid. Someone doesn’t answer our text or email and we make up a whole story about why they don’t like us or respect us. Before we even know it, we get viscerally upset about this made up story or imaginary mental exchange we have had with another person. It’s not productive to put too much stock in what we think other people are thinking about us.

That’s pitfall number one. Here’s pitfall number two: When I was a freshman in college, I had a very important teacher, Rabbi Zalman Schacter Shalomi, who gave me a way to think about how I could work to become my own judge, not constantly see my actions though the eyes of others. He said, each of us walks around with an “internal audience” people who we choose and then place in a viewer’s gallery looking down at us as we go through our day. We put different people in that gallery: It might be your father or your mother, a professor you admire, a new person you’ve met who has made an impression on you. Then when we speak, or write or do something, we think; how would that person respond to what we said? Would this impress a new friend? What would this professor think if she heard me say this clever retort? Now, it’s totally natural to wonder what other people think of us. And certainly we should pay when friends and family and teachers sit down and thoughtfully share their perspectives on the work we have done or how they’ve been affected by our words or our actions. But Reb Zalman said, and I’m saying now, the imagined reactions of your internal audience won’t give you much valuable information about how you, as a person, must live your life.

Rosh HaShannah is a time for self-assessment, in Hebrew, heshbon hanefesh and if we are to do that well, we have to make our own assessment about who we are and how we’ve acted in the past year. How do you get clear enough to ask your own questions in order to take a thoughtful look at your life? How do you determine what’s really important to you in this New Year?

Tonight, I want to talk practically and make some suggestions that hopefully will be helpful to you over the next ten days. So, what are the questions? The first question, in the deepest sense, is how are you, really, how are you? And your answer has to be an honest answer. It’s terrible to lie to other people but it’s far worse to lie to yourself. I had a pretty horrendous year last year: both my dad and my mom died. So when I ask myself how I’m doing, the real answer is: I’m sort of a mess. I can live with that. I’ve been a mess before and things have gotten better. So I trust things will get better again. But if I pretend that I’m fine when I’m not, my self-assessment isn’t starting from an honest place.

And our lives are multi-tiered and even if one part isn’t great, what are other parts of your life that are working well, bringing you joy, giving you opportunities for growth? After “How are you, really?” then I’ll ask: what do I really feel passionate about? (You know, this changes from year to year) and am I making enough time for those things in my life? I’ll ask, “Am I taking care of myself, intellectually and emotionally and physically?”

Then, after you get some sense of how you really are, you go on to the next set of questions, questions about the important people in my life. I’ll ask: How have things been going with my friends and my family? Have I been honest with them? Have I put enough energy and time into my relationships with them? Are there things I’ve taken for granted? Are there things I need to apologize for or do differently in the year to come?

And then I’ll try to go broader and consider the world around me: Am I actually making some kind of contribution to my community? When I think about the current state of our country, I’ll think that this mess is too big for me to fix but am I, in my own small way, doing something to move my community, my country, this world in a good direction? (Music and Resistance) Do my words match my actions? As a Jew: Is my Jewish practice helping me to grow spiritually? Do I need to think more about what I want from, and what I might give to the Jewish community?

Now the point of these questions -- I want to stress -- is not to beat yourself up and not to make you feel guilty. It’s to bring some clarity to how we need to redirect our actions and our priorities. The questions should help us consider the way we need to turn in the year ahead. I’m hesitant to use the word “resolutions” because we all know how easily and quickly New Year’s resolutions seem to get broken. Instead, I use the traditional word “redirection,” teshuvah. That word doesn’t so much imply resolutions that are set in stone, but a direction toward which we turn, a goal on which we set our sights. A vision of a life where we hope to do a little better living in a way that reflects who we really are and what is really important to us. There is no pain as deep as the pain we feel when we are exiled from our true selves. There is no joy as profound as the joy we experience when we feel we are acting with integrity, treating the people we care about they way we know we should treat them, preparing for, and doing, those things which are deeply meaningful in our lives. But the only thing that really gets us to that place is a self-assessment, lovingly and thoughtfully examining ourselves through our own eyes.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t value and pay attention to what our friends and teachers and parents say. We should always listen to them, except in one area: that’s when other people try to tell us who we are. I want to close with one of my favorite stories from the Torah. This happens when Moses is leading the Jewish people into the land of Israel and he sends a group of twelve people to check out the land and gather information. They returned carrying a bunch of grapes so big that two men had to support it on a pole between their shoulders. And they said, “It’s not only the grapes that are big. The people in the land are so big that when we saw them we felt like grasshoppers.” And then they say, “And we must have looked like grasshoppers in their eyes, too.” The Hassic rebbe, Menahem Mendl of Kotzk says that when the spies said that line, they were committing a grave sin. (I learned this next part from my friend and teacher, Rabbi Larry Kushner.) What was the sin? The rebbe continues and says, it’s all right to say you feel like a grasshopper – that just means you’re paying attention to your own feelings and perceptions. But when you start imaging what you look like to someone else, that’s the sin. You’ve given them permission to define you. This is what keeps us children: when we allow other people to define us. But there was one of the spies, Caleb, who rejected that assessment. He said, no, I disagree. We’re little and they are big but we can still do this thing, this challenge is not too much for us. He makes this self-assessment and because of that, he is one of only two people from the wilderness generation to be allowed to enter the Promised Land.

The people in our internal audience won’t tell us the ways we need to change and grow in the coming year. Seeing ourselves through other’s eyes won’t chart the direction that we need to turn. Each of us must take careful account of our own priorities and values, who we are and who we wish to become, to move us successfully into this New Year. Shanah tovah. Wishes for a productive and meaningful Rosh Hashanah.