When I turned 40, I wrote a sermon I called: “I’m Getting Older.” 31 years later I ask myself: what was I thinking?
Boomers are obsessed with aging. We have two standards to determine old age: number one — older than Bob Dylan. Right now, he’s 82. However, those with gray hair, don’t rejoice too much, because another boomer icon, Paul McCartney, also set a bar for old age in his famous song, which asks, in a lament that’s crushingly poignant: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me/ When I’m sixty-four.”
Retirement is challenging. I celebrate that I no longer am slave to a packed calendar. Up through June 30, 2019, my calendar overflowed — nothing could happen at my synagogue without me — or so I thought. On July 1, 2019 I woke up to an empty calendar. I didn’t feel badly for me. I felt badly for them. How would they go on without me?
I quickly found out. Quite well, thank you very much. As challenging as it is to get up every morning and go to work, it’s a different but entirely daunting challenge not to have to go to work every day. Notice what Paul’s song says: Will you still need me: will I have purpose? And, will you still feed me: will someone take care of me when I need it.
Meaning and a caring community: those are things elders worry about. Many of them are truly abandoned by loved ones and friends when they are most vulnerable. And too many others all around us feel that society has abandoned them as well.
The willingness to throw others away is as old as the Bible; but in our day it has become, you should pardon the expression, a pandemic. These words are about how today we are too willing to throw so many people away.
America’s political rhetoric is disgustingly strident. The left casts aside those who express what are considered unacceptable views through its program of cancellation and political correctness. The right rejects the trend of the last 60 years or so towards a more open and tolerant America, with its wars against LGBTQ+ folks, abortion, Critical Race Theory, people of color, immigrants, and its willful and shameful distortion of the term “Woke.”
In my file for a sermon like this I have articles from the last couple of years with titles like, “America is Getting Meaner”; “Am I morally bound to confront friends who support President Trump or to stop speaking to them?”; “Is There a Way to Dial Down the Political Hatred?”; Senator Ben Sasse published a book titled: Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal.
Nate Cohen of the New York Times wrote that today, we “… not only clash over policy and ideology, but [we] see the other side as alien and immoral… Democrats and Republicans… don’t just disagree, they dislike each other… According to polls, a majority of Americans say that other Americans were the greatest threat to America.”
The writer Anne Lamott once wrote words that go to the heart of the matter: “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Jews know what it feels like to be thrown away. They are the original disposable people. Got a problem with the economy? Throw the Jews away. Got a problem with social unity — throw the Jews away. The Jewish people entered history in the Bible as war refugees, a throw-away people, and that’s why the Israelites are commanded over 50 times in the Bible not to ever do that to other people.
A strange Talmudic passage tells a story about the ancient rabbis throwing away one of their colleagues. The first part of the story describes a debate in the rabbinic academy, and how Rabbi Eliezer was the lone dissenter from the majority of the rabbis. Confident he was right, he elicits “miracles” to prove his point.
The rabbis are unmoved. At Rabbi Eliezer’s command, God’s voice even appears in the story to affirm that Eliezer is correct. The rabbis, unimpressed, still don’t budge. As a footnote to this part of the story, we’re told that God delighted in the way the rabbis ignored his intervention. God even laughed!
What happens next is shocking. The majority of the rabbis express their anger towards Eliezer by reversing every decision he ever made. They cancel him. It falls to Rabbi Akiva to share the horrifying news with his teacher, Rabbi Eliezer. When Eliezer hears the news, he’s devastated. “He begins to weep, rends his garments, and sits on the ground like a mourner.”
Then the Talmud tells us how God reacts. God is furious. Here is the punishment God metes out: a third of the olive crop is destroyed, a third of the wheat, and a third of the barley are destroyed. There was death and destruction. Today, we might say God went all biblical on them.
Rabbi Daniel Gordis commented on this passage: “The point of the story is to be found in the comparison between God’s two reactions. Kick God out of the discussion, the Talmud says, and God laughs. Treat a human being the way the rabbis treated Rabbi Eliezer, and God’s wrath knows almost no limit. Legal views (or political views, or moral views) are one thing, the story seems to suggest, and on those, reasonable minds can differ. But when it comes to ‘trashing’ another human being, that God will not abide.”
Religious traditions are unyielding on this point. For example, the Talmud tells another story of the most rejected of rabbis, Elisha ben Abuya. He was rejected because he rejected Judaism. The rejection was so complete that the rabbis gave him the nickname “Acher,” which means, the Other. He was the hated other. He was completely ostracized.
One rabbi, the great Rabbi Meir, would go and study with him because Acher had been his teacher. This enraged the other rabbis who confronted Rabbi Meir — How can you be with him? Don’t you realize he is an apostate? Don’t you realize he doesn’t believe in God or God’s justice? Don’t you realize he has dropped out of our people? Rabbi Meir responded simply, “He’s my teacher. To me he is a pomegranate. I take the fruit and I don’t eat the peeling.”
Perhaps the most significant revolution in human thinking is found in the opening passage of the Bible, when God creates humanity in God’s own image. According to the rabbinic tradition, that moment in cosmic history occurred on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, which doesn’t celebrate the creation of the world, as many people think, but the creation of humanity.
The idea of “created in God’s image,” was not original to the Bible, but it was the Hebrew Bible that applied the idea to every human being on earth; not just the elite of society. That’s why a Jewish sage could teach: If you slap the face of another person, it is as though you slapped the face of God.
If you are to call yourself religious, you have to take that seriously; as well as the idea that follows: every human must be treated with dignity and respect. No one should be thrown away, abandoned, cancelled. Love your neighbor as yourself.
As America enters the election season, it’s important to keep this in mind. Don’t be so quick to hate and cancel. Or even to judge. Instead, let’s create relationships and communities in which differences are a goal; because they’re a good thing. Leave some space for ambiguity and complexity in your political opinions. Be humble and doubt yourself a little bit. Respect those who disagree with you.
Be curious about why that person believes something so contrary to what you believe. Acknowledge that some who agree with you have faults and some who disagree have virtues. Be more interested in learning from people you disagree with than winning an argument with them. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, wrote, learn how to “live graciously with those with whom [you] disagree.”
For those we hate, for those we disagree with, for those we just don’t like, for all those whom others have thrown away — may we find some way to see the good in them; to “take the fruit,” and to put the peeling away.
A footnote to the Paul McCartney song, to reassure my fellow boomers. Paul’s 81 now, and wiser. He has said, “If I were to write it now, I’d probably call it ‘When I’m 94.’”
Michael Berk is Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel, the largest Jewish congregation in San Diego and the oldest in Southern California.
