but i am not abraham…rabbi elliott tepperman yom kippur 2013

But I am not Abraham… R. Elliott Tepperman YK 5774/2013

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Our stories describe saints and scholars with truly elevated traits. But when you hear about their achievements, it is no cause for discouragement. Don’t say: “Oh, not me, I'm nowhere near that level!” On the contrary, desire it for yourself! Tell yourself: “Were they not flesh and blood as I am? They too might have wasted their lives and accomplished nothing. What could truly prevent me from reaching that goal?” R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira Conscious Community

I want to share with you some stories today about struggle. About people facing moments in their lives that are challenging and painful, but because they feel not choice they muddle through: Story One: but I am not Abraham. With some hesitancy I would like to begin with story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Why hesitancy? Because I think the story is easily interpreted in ways that aren’t so useful. God tests Abraham asking him to sacrifice his son Isaac. The common understanding of this story is that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son is evidence of his deep faith in God. And thus Judaism simultaneously holds itself up as a faith equal to any that require human sacrifice while declaring that no such sacrifice will ever be required in Judaism. The most useful drash I’ve heard recently of this text was in an essay by the Christian theologian Miroslav Volf. While reading a journal about Abraham’s ordeal he found himself nodding in agreement…”while no justification of Abraham’s action may be offered, he is to be admired for trusting God beyond the limits of his understanding, however this is admirable only in the contexts of a long life of obedience and love.” (Against the Tide p.65) His casual nodding agreement while reading this piece of theology was interrupted by the tiny outline of a hand, drawn by his 20-month-old son the day before on a blank space of the journal. Distracted by the image, he imagines his son asking, “Would you have done it?” He writes: “No son,” I quickly responded, shuddering at the very thought of it. “I would never have done it.” “But weren’t you just nodding your head in agreement with the article?” “Yes, but I am not Abraham.” Thank God, we are not Abraham. But the important truth of Abraham’s story is that we are


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all called on to make enormous sacrifices. Typically these sacrifices are things we have little or no control over. We like Abraham wake up early in the morning with impossible choices ahead of us. We simply do not know how we will get through the day. Sometimes these are the circumstances of life. We find ourselves, exhausted from doing everything we can to help a loved one, or worried about a friend who we don’t know how to help, or struggling to keep a job, or working harder than we ever thought we would have to… Not because we want to, but because we feel we have no choice, we find a way to respond, to continue, even though the outcome is unknown. We act out of something like faith, that somehow we will get through this challenging moment. For some of us it is useful to call that faith God. Story Two: Joan Hockey, but I am not Abraham. In March of this year, Joan Hockey gave an especially moving devar Torah. I had asked her to speak after conversations we had about the challenges of caring for her son Vaughn who has Autism. Lutheran Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber is famous for her radically inclusive church the House of All Sinners and Saints. She teaches and I agree, that one truth of building community is that we will eventually fail each other. We will miss the opportunity to offer support when there are challenges that do not fit neatly into boxes. This is a true here at Bnai Keshet. Trust me that if you come to feel this is your community, if it comes to be important to you, you should be prepared with the truth that we, that I, will eventually let you down. As a human institution it is inevitable that a synagogue community will sometimes fail. When that moment comes, I hope that you stick around and seek repair, because it is in this repair that relationships are built and our community is founded. I knew that Joan’s experience was one such failure. That often the demands of raising a child with autism, coupled with the lack of structural support, prevented her from participating in the very community she looked to for spiritual sustenance. And as part of our ongoing effort of repair I asked her to share her story because I hoped, and still hope that we could do better at helping each other through similar struggles.


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Joan began her talk noting that the devar she had planned to give was upended, by the snow of the previous day: It’s Friday morning, and as usual I try to start the day with a short meditation, but as I am sitting I get one of those robocalls that Vaughn’s school is delayed 1 ½ hours because of snow. I barely have a chance to wish myself and all beings peace and good health when there is another call saying, “School is cancelled today. This is for the safety of your child.” Now maybe your child, I think, but monitoring the safety of a 12 year old boy with autism and the athletic prowess of someone twice his size, the impulse control of someone half his age and the energy of someone who has just had a triple espresso requires a level of stamina that makes a snow day feel like boot camp. (In fact, research shows that caregivers of teenage boys with autism have the stress level of combat soldiers.)

She continued sharing the challenges of this one unplanned day at home. Near the end of her talk outlining some of the unseen challenges she had experienced as a parent of a child with special needs she shared: The truth is, I don’t want to be doing this, I don’t want to be explaining it to you, there are so many things I’d rather be discussing that are far more interesting, but this is my life right now. A spiritual practice doesn’t just happen in a vacuum or on a cushion or a chair in a quiet room like this. It’s what we do every day, every moment. People often say to me, “I don’t know how you do it!” or “I could never do what you do!” It seems a false sort of praise, something you say to distance yourself rather than place yourself in someone else’s shoes.

She continued: Of course you could, and you would do any difficult job that was put on your plate. We will all at some point have something placed there that is more than we think we can handle. But we won’t have a choice. I repeat : Of course you could, and you would do any difficult job that was put on your plate. We will all at some point have something placed there that is more than we think we can handle. But we won’t have a choice.


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I was so moved by this talk, by her sharing of the truth. You know that point after a devar Torah where I ask people a question or ask for response – well that day at that moment, I couldn’t stand up, I felt so emotionally raw I was embarrassed to speak… I remained seated and mumbled something like… “You know that responding thing we do… uh… someone want to say something?” Luckily someone did. Joan is right – How will we do it? How will we face enormous challenge when it is placed in front of us? Our secret and unwanted weapon is that we won’t have a choice. The meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein teaches something similar about compassion. She points out simply, that everything that can happen, is happening. Every time we hear a story of illness, or death or much worse we tend to react with surprise. It is shocking to our hearts – It is heartbreaking, but side by side with all the boring and joyous things happening in the world at this very moment is all this suffering. Open the paper, turn on the news, listen to a friend and everyday you will hear a story of suffering and perseverance. And all this struggling to get through challenge is happening, not because we are all so noble or saintly but because we don’t have a choice. Abraham Continued: I take it back – we are noble, we are saintly but mostly we are human. We may not be Abraham but we are humans struggling, suffering, making thousands of excruciating choices not because we want to, but because feel we have to. Another word for this experience? …Is being commanded. We may not experience this commandment like Abraham did as coming from God, but we look around at the world and see the truth of our situation and we say something like: Well it is true I hate my job, but for now we need health insurance so I will stay put… Or – I have no idea why I have such a hard child to raise – but she is my daughter, I love her and I trust that one day what I am learning from this struggle will be a blessing. Or – I am going to let go of the question – why did I get cancer and move on to how will I use my life now that I have cancer. Or –


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I am going to start taking better care of myself – not because my doctor told me to, or because I like exercising – but because I want to live, I want to live a full life, I want to be alive for my family. I have heard from you all of these courageous words in the face of no other choice. We may not be Abraham who shockingly finds himself in a place where he does not know how his child will survive the day and what he should do about it… but we are all compelled to struggle through life, often living lives very different than we imagined, often making sacrifices that we would never have chosen but cannot imagine not making. HORA Sylvia Boorstein also teaches about the way we experience lifecycle events. Think of that moment at a Bar or Bat Mitzvah or a wedding when Hava Nagila starts and everyone gets up to dance. Everyone: the littlest kids, the grandparents, the lifelong friends, the Christian neighbors. We are in these moments truly celebrating for the 13 year old or the couple. But on another level, we are engaged in some ancient tribal custom, we are declaring, “I made it! I lived to see this moment!” And we look around the room, knowing the loved ones who are missing and grateful for the faces that are present stomping around in the simplest way. This is the power of one of Judaism’s great prayers the shehechiyanu – Baruch atah adonay eloheynu melech haolam shehechiyanu, vekiyemanu, vehigiyanu lazeman hazeh. Thank you for having kept me alive, kept me strong, and brought me to this day. It is a prayer of gratitude and joy that also acknowledges the suffering in life. It is one of the holy mysteries of life that often as we suffer we simultaneously are able to experience extraordinary gratitude. So many times I have sat with you during your hardest moments and heard you begin a sentence with mourning, or loss, or struggle, or worry, or pain… and then conclude the sentence… “but I am so grateful.” Grateful for the help of friends and strangers alike, thankful for family, appreciative of this very moment of waking up, happy to be alive… shehechiyanu


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Story three: Bruriah, But I am not Abraham Bruriah was a brilliant Torah scholar and is one of the most honored women of the

Talmud. She and her husband Rabbi Meir had two young sons.

A midrash teaches that one Sabbath afternoon, while Rabbi Meir was at synagogue, their

sons suddenly fell ill and died.

Bruriah their mother, numb with grief, laid them in bed, covered them and waited for her

husband to return.

When Rabbi Meir came in he asked for his sons.

‘They have gone out,’ said Beruriah, ‘Let us say the prayers to usher out Shabbat.’

When they finished the prayer of Havdalah (that ends Shabbat), Rabbi Meir said again,

‘Where are the boys?’

‘They are all right’ answered Beruriah, placing supper before him, ‘Come and eat.’

After supper she said to him,

‘I have to consult with you about something. A couple of years ago a stranger came by,

and left two precious jewels with me for safekeeping.

Yesterday the stranger returned and asked for them back, but they are so beautiful and I

have grown to love them; do I have to give them back to him?’

‘My love,’ Rabbi Meir answered, ‘I am surprised that you, a scholar, need to ask me such

a question.

However much you love the two jewels, they were never yours to keep.

They were only entrusted to you for a while.

Of course you must return them when the owner asks.’

With that she took him by the hand and led him into the bedroom. When she drew back

the sheet and he saw his children, he cried out in grief, (‘My sons, my sons! My teachers,

my teachers! My sons in this world, but my teachers because you lit up my eyes with the

light of heaven!’)

Then Bruriah sobbed, ‘You yourself said, we must return what is entrusted to our care.’

Then offering words not of explanation but of faith she says.

‘Adonai gave, and Adonai has taken away; blessed be the Adonai.’ (From Midrash

Proverbs 31:10) Sefer Agadah 247:205

Sometimes life is extraordinarily painful. Sometimes our sacrifices feel too great to bear. Sacrifices that we did not choose, sacrifices we would never choose. These losses cannot even really be called sacrifices because they are not offered freely but feel more like they are taken against our every wish. But we have no choice and these sacrifices make demands of us… The Buddhist Nun, Pema Chodron teaches:


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“No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. We are rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear.… dissociating from fear is what we do naturally.” “Sometimes, however, we are cornered, everything falls apart, and we run out of options for escape. At times like that, the most profound spiritual truths seem pretty straightforward and ordinary. There’s nowhere to hide.” (When Things Fall Apart, p.12) What is moving to me about Bruriah is her ability to face her loss. She faces her horrifying loss and sits with the simple spiritual truth that arises from it. The source of all existence, nature, life, Adonai – requires that we face again and again the miraculous and painful truth of life coming and life going. On Rosh Hashanah we say Hayom Harat Olam –today the world is born. And every day, the morning prayers include uvtuvo mechadesh bechol yom tamid maasei bereshit – in goodness, every day you renew creations work. Both are ways of saying the world is constantly changing. That life is constantly in transition. Teshuva is the ongoing effort to remain balanced and on track in the face of all this transition. Some moments we have nowhere else to turn and we are forced to face pain, loss, embarrassment, hopelessness. We are forced to notice that the world is no longer what it once was or at least is not what we thought it was. Pema Chodron describes these moments as an unconditional relationship with reality. I have often heard people describe such moments as surreal or unreal, but I think that they are super-real. We are so used to turning away from discomfort, suffering and loss that when we have no choice, the experience of being absolutely glued to the present moment feels unfamiliar. This July, my wife Sarah’s sister, my sister-in-law lost her husband Shawn to a totally unexpected heart attack. He was 49. Last week, I heard that my sister-in-law had turned off her cable TV. She saw herself coming home day after day, overwhelmed with grief, and turning on the TV, too exhausted to face what lay before her, changing channels until she fell asleep.


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So my sister-in-law, who still doesn’t know how she will move on from this loss and or how to get through the work required of her to rebuild her life, knew she needed remove the escape valve. She moved in closer like Bruriah facing the command to be with the pain, or do the work or to take care of herself. She turned off the cable, deciding to reduce her options of escape and instead to take one of the thousands of courageous baby-steps needed to move forward. Even when life goes the way it should we lose priceless jewels. We lose what we love the most and we try to find a way to move on. A Final Story: Zusya – (Based on Reb Zusya From Partners with God by Gila Gevirtz, Behrman House) Perhaps you know the story of Zusya? He loved God with all his heart and soul, and treated everyone with respect and kindness. Students came from far and near, hoping to learn from this gentle and wise rabbi. One day, Zusya did not appear at the usual hour. By evening his students realized that something terrible must have happened. So they all rushed to Zusya’s house. In the far corner of the house they saw the old rabbi lying huddled in bed, too ill to get up and greet them. “Rabbi Zusya!” his students cried. “What has happened? How can we help you?” “There is nothing you can do,” answered Zusya. “I’m dying and I am very frightened.” “Why are you afraid?” the youngest student asked. “Didn’t you teach us that all living things die?” “Of course, every living thing must die some day,” said the Rabbi. The young student tried to comfort Rabbi Zusya saying, “Then why are you afraid? You have led such a good life. You have believed in God with a faith as strong as Abraham’s and you have followed the commandments as carefully as Moses.” “Thank you. But this is not why I am afraid,” explained the rabbi. “For if God should ask me why I did not act like Abraham, I can say but I was not Abraham. And if God asks me why I did not act like Moses, I can also say but I was not Moses.”


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“But if God should ask me to account for the times when I did not act like Zusya, what shall I say then?”

Our task in life is not to be Abraham, or Bruriah or Joan or Pema Chodron or my sister-in-law or Sylvia Boorstein or even Zusya, but we are each called upon to respond to challenges unique to our own lives, including some that seem too heavy to bear. It is good to remember that side-by-side with suffering there is great blessing; Great reason for gratitude. We can stomp the hora, we can say a shehechiynu, we can defiantly declare we made it to this moment. For most of us, our challenge is to remember that when we need to we have the ability to face great difficulties. And we are challenged to bring that capacity to life’s important though less pressing demands. When, thank goodness, things are pretty good, our task is to feel commanded to broaden our perspective. Joan Hockey ended her talk in March with these words: The subtext of saying that you couldn’t imagine facing someone else’s challenge is “Thank God it is you and not me.” And there is not much ‘God’ in that response; just ‘you’ and ‘me,’ separate and unconnected, what Einstein called “the optical delusion of consciousness” that makes us think we are not part of the same universe and creates a kind of prison. Our task, (Einstein) wrote, is “to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace everyone.”

When we look more honestly into the needs of our neighbors or listen to the truth of strangers, we will see others, courageously struggling, because they have no choice. We often choose, so often we hardly notice, to remain imprisoned in delusion: ignoring their suffering, turning away, separating. But we also have the capacity to choose to sacrifice our illusion of safety, our buffer zone from suffering and enter an unconditional relationship with reality, a relationship that comes with the freedom of ever widening circles of compassion. When we have a choice, our challenge is to respond as though we did not. To feel commanded. To turn off the cable, or turn away from the pleasantries and self-pampering we are accustomed to and move courageously closer to the fear and struggle.


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On Rosh Hashanah I spoke about how the Egyptians call us ivre Hebrews, strangers. But the name we get from God is Yisrael – God wrestlers. When we respond to the pain of the Hebrew – the stranger, like Yisrael, God wrestlers, opening our hearts to their reality with all the calls and commands that such knowledge might provoke… It is then through answering this call that we merit the name we give ourselves: Jews – Yehuda – Those who thank God. Those who celebrate life’s joys and face its sorrows and still feel gratitude. Blessed are you Adonay our God, sovereign of all worlds for having kept us alive, kept us strong, and brought us to this day. Baruch atah adonay eloheynu melech haolam shehechiyanu, vekiyemanu, vehigiyanu lazeman hazeh.

but i am not abraham…rabbi elliott tepperman yom kippur 2013

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