Congregation Netivot Shalom

Yom Kippur, 5762, 2001
Joanna Weinberg

Teshuvah and Tzedakah: How to Heal the Wounds

I want to appear -to be-learned, but I must also show you what is in my heart. I am sitting in my mother's living room, and my mother is sitting in a chair, drifting in and out of dreams. I want to talk to her about the world we have seen in these last two weeks, but I can't. It is a world she is getting ready to leave-maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, next month. I want to talk about this world with my father, aleva ha shalom, but he too is not here to here about it. I want to ask them how to make teshuvah in this world? They are/were not observant and probably wouldn't know what teshuvah even means. But they did now how, and they lived through far more troubling times than now. My father's heart would have been broken by the destruction of the building he watched being built, from his Madison Avenue office (you could see it from there), and that he worked in the shadow of. I am also heartbroken, not only by the destruction of so many lives, but by the destruction of the buildings that represented so much. I am heartbroken even though, as I watched and read about them being built, I scorned the excess of capitalist fervor that they represented (you can see where my mind was in the late sixties). These last two weeks we have all been mourning, and collectively we have gone back and forth as a nation and as individuals through the stages of mourning - denial - this could not have happened, it is a movie… anger - we will use all our force against the evil villains, wanted "dead or alive"… bargaining - if we give blood, money, clothing, food…if we change our laws so that immigrants will be watched… depression - most of all depression. Most of us have not yet reached the final stage, acceptance. And we seem to be racing back and forth across the stages. Why is that? I have come to believe in these last weeks that for me, and I think for many of us, the destruction of the WTC is as symbolic as it is real-a climactic change, a paradigm shift, from ever onward and upward, bigger, taller, to something different, but something that we do not yet know.

On September 12 someone emailed me this poem; some of you may have seen it. At the time it struck me as immeasurably sad, a reflection and a confirming that the worst had happened. But I want to read it to you now because in preparing this drosh I discovered another dimension to the destruction, one with a ray of hope. In the Haftorah we read this morning, Isaiah says "And God will say, make a path, clear the way, remove the stumbling block out of the way of my people…"

Skyscraper

Carl Sandburg 1916

By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul.

Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys.

It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories.

(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman the way to it?)

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out.

Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words, and tell terrors and profits and losses, curses of men grappling plans of business and questions of women in plots of love.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the building to a turning planet.

Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors.

Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted.

Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words

And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.

Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back doors hundreds of miles away and the bricklayer who went to state's prison for shooting another man while drunk.

(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge˜he is here˜his soul has gone into the stones of the building.)

On the office doors from tier to tier, hundreds of names and each name standing for a face written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's ease of life.

Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room to room.

Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth.

...

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women who go away and eat and come back to work.

Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them.

One by one the floors are emptied... The uniformed elevator men are gone. Pails clang... Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the day.

Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds... Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets... Steel safes stand in corners. Money is stacked in them.

A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

Think about the souls, of the buildings and of the lives. The NYT Magazine and the New Yorker last week both tried to represent this on their covers -- the NYC skyline, with the towers transparent and ghostly, their souls When I first read this, it seemed so tragic, all the more so because of the souls that were lost in the destruction of the Twin Towers. But the lesson I want to convey for today is contained in the Haftorah, in the famous passages about feeding the hungry and clothing the poor:

"This is my chosen fast," "To loosen all the bonds that bind men unfairly, to let the oppressed go free,to break every yoke. Share your bread with the hungry, take the homeless into your home. Clothe the naked when you see them, do not turn away from people in need."

There are three points I want to make here. First, of course, is the central message of tzedakah as integrally connected with tsheuvah - we cannot achieve the full measure of repentance unless we also recognize the community needs outside of our immediate selves.

Standing on the steps of the Jerusalem Temple, Isaiah told the people that God has no interest in their fasts or their piety if it's not rooted in a sincere concern for their community: "THIS is the fast I have chosen for you." Not simply to feel noble about being hungry; not simply to sit here in the middle of the day, as we are now, feeling proud that we are fulfilling the fast, but to do more, to take upon oneself an active role of community building: …and that thy hide not thyself from [the community]…then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thy healing shall spring forth speedily…"

The second point is the theme of building that is interwoven with the Tzsedakah/ Teshuvah : "…And God will say, make a path, clear the way, remove the stumbling block out of the way of my people… It is, of course, immediately and eerily relevant for us right now: …your children shall build the old waste places, though shall raise up the foundations of many generations; and though shall be called the repairer of the breech, the restorer of paths to dwell in…" And the rebuilding is both concrete and spiritual, again eerily relevant.

The third point is the joining together of Tzedakah and Teshuvah. On Rosh HaShanah we say "U'Teshuvah, U'Tefila U'Tzedakah maavirin et roa ha-gezera," … and Repentance and Prayer and Charity remove the harsh decree."

What do those terms mean? The definitions: Tzedakah : charity; helping one who is less fortunate than oneself; from the root "Tzedek," meaning "Justice" or "Righteousness." The concept of "Justice" applies because all wealth is Adonai's and it is allocated by Adonai, not necessarily on the basis of any rationale known to us. Therefore, the fact that one has more than the other fellow says not much about who deserved it more. In any case, it is said to be a higher form of "Tzedakah" to give it anonymously than if the recipient knows the identity of the giver. And it is said to be a still higher level, according to the Talmud and quoted by the RAMBAM, when one helps the other person help himself, as is the case when he helps him find a job. Consider this alternate interpretation: One who provides help without being asked, because it is needed, should also be considered a Tzedek, even if it is not given anonymously; for in a close community, few actions are truly anonymous.

Teshuvah - Repentance, or return to God or the Godly way of life; modifying one's behavior by the following four steps: stopping the sinful behavior, confession before God, regret over past actions, and commitment to changed behavior in the future. If done out of fear of Divine punishment, Teshuvah turns past deliberate sins into "accidental" sins; if done out of love of God, Teshuvah has the power to transform deliberate sins into "good deeds."

We must fast on this day and we must also know that we are choosing to do so, while many others fast against their will. God wants us to choose life, but again, in order to do so, we must ensure that others will live as well. What is this unity based upon? According to Rav Kook the glue bringing the people of Israel together is the collective spirit - the spirit of God. According to the Midrash, on Yom Kippur the people of Israel are likened to ministering angels without any physicality, and in this way we attain unity (see Ramban 16:8), "as the ministering angels of peace mediate among themselves, the Israel of peace mediates among themselves on Yom Kippur."

Two modern midrashim:

There was a famous doctor who was a talented surgeon and a gifted teacher. He walked through the hospital, followed by his residents and interns, showing them this brilliant diagnosis, that skillful surgery, another person saved from the brink of death. His brilliance was so great that students and teachers listened intently to every word, hoping to acquire the art of healing. At one bed he stopped. An old woman was in the bed. She was in the hospital because she had nowhere else to go (this was in the days before managed care); she was near death, and there was no brilliant treatment or surgery that could help her. So why, the students wondered, did he stop here? What could they learn? The doctor smiled at the woman and looked at her uneaten food, which she was too weak to eat by herself. He sat down on her bed, and fed her, gently wiping her mouth, and speaking in soft words to her. He stayed, with the students watching, but unaware of them, for 20 minutes. In this act of tsedakah, he acted out the true meaning of teshuva

Another midrash: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched side-by- side from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. King. A host of white citizens, filled with venomous hate, surrounded the marchers, jeered and spat upon them. Heschel declared later: "When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying." It is important not only to protest against evil but to be seen protesting. Faith in the goodness and oneness of God is powerfully expressed through the language of feet, hands, and spine.

We may choose different ways to act, different forms of tsedakah. But they should all lead us to teshuvah. One of the ironies of this disaster, as with many disasters, is the outpouring of charity and giving that flows from all over the country, all over the world. The blood and food banks in New York are full; the charitable agencies are turning away volunteers, who leave disappointed that their services are not needed. But we all know what will happen in a few weeks, moths, years. The blood banks will still need blood, the food banks will lack sufficient food, the homeless person at the entrance to the bridge will still be there with his "Homeless veteran" sign. That is when we must pray with our feet, with our hands, our hearts.

Thank you and Gmar Tov.