Buenas noches y feliz ano nuevo.
Good evening and Happy New Year!
This summer, I started to learn Spanish. I'm using a free app, Duolingo. It can help you learn over 30 different languages, including French, German, Hebrew, esperanta, and in case you're a Trekkie, even Klingon.
I've been wondering around the house annoying Emily with basic sentences such as: Mi perro es marron (my dog is brown), Tu es mi esposa (you are my wife), and I've been very impressed with myself walking into restaurants and telling the hostess, una mesa para dos personas (a table for two people).
After progressing through some of Duolingo's introductory lessons, I got stuck on the indicative verb 'to be.' There are two different verbs that convey a state of being. Yo estoy is used if you want to convey something temporary. Right now, on this first day of our new year, I'm a happy person - Yo estoy feliz. But Yo soy, which also means, I am, refers to something different; it references an existential state of being. If I say, Yo soy feliz, it means that fundamentally, I am a happy person.
As I continued my daily learning streak, I realized that this grammatical curiosity could introduce a powerful lesson on these High Holidays. One verb reflects how you are feeling or what you are doing at a specific moment in time. But the other verb describes who. you. are. Tonight as we begin a new year, our tradition challenges us to examine ourselves at this deepest fundamental level.
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Who are you?
This is the question on these Days of Awe. We can't couch answers behind what we are doing, or our profession, or status, or health, or any other number of distractions that take up too much of our every day lives.
I've probably told this story before: The new rabbi is preparing for the Rosh Hashanah service and she walks into the senior rabbi's office, proud of herself for getting everything done. The cues are in order, there are sticky notes with all of the correct pages written down, and she feels good about the flow of the service. The senior rabbi says, Bless your heart ... You're not done. The prayerbook and the cues are the same as they were last year. But you are not the same. That's what you need to prepare!
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Tonight, we focus on the important questions. Typically, we ask the easier questions, and we think we actually know something important. Exupery highlights this in one of my favorite books, The Little Prince:
When you tell grownups about a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you: "What does his voice sound like? What games does he prefer? Does he collect butterflies?" Instead, they demand: "How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?" Then they think that they have learned something about him.
It can be difficult to learn matters of substance about someone else. We make decisions based on what we know at the current moment. When trying out for an orchestra, a panel of experts might only listen to a violinist for a few minutes before making a decision. You meet someone and instantly know whether or not you like them.
Malcolm Gladwell calls this 'thin-slicing.' Most of the time, we only have access to very thin slices of information. All we can hope do is make the best decision we can with whatever limited information is available. The challenge is that we focus too much on simple labels and categories, and not nearly enough on who people actually are.
Martin Buber made an important distinction in his seminal work, I & Thou. A 20th century Jewish philosopher, Buber taught that there are two ways that we relate to each other and to God. There are 'I-it relationships' and 'I-Thou relationships.'
Buber writes, I perceive something. I am sensible of something. I imagine something. I will something. This is the world of experience. Right now, each of you are collecting data and information (Today is Rosh Hashanah, I'm sitting next to so-and-so) categorizing it (I feel hopeful for this year to come), and theorizing about it (Services will be so wonderful next year in our new sanctuary).
The object of that experience is what Buber calls the 'It.' 'It' is something to be used, utilized, put to a specific purpose or task.
When you go to Kroger and interact with the cashier, that is an I-It relationship. When your air conditioning breaks in July and you call the AC company, the phone call is an I-It interaction. Most of our conversations, even with our partners, are I-It conversations: What time will you be home? Did you take the garbage out? Where do you want to go to dinner? Why didn't you take the garbage out?" These are necessary interactions, but we should know that they are not sufficient.
Buber continues, The life of human beings does not consist of all this alone. This establish the realm of It. But the realm of Thou has a different basis. When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For when there is a thing, there is another thing. Every 'It' is bounded by others. But Thou has no bounds.
In an I-Thou relationship, another person isn't an object of your experience, but is instead a subject alongside of you. The boundaries delineating us from them no longer exist, because there is no longer a separation. I-Thou relationships are created when we ask, 'Who are you' questions instead of 'How are you' or 'What do you do' questions.
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We need a little more I-Thou in our lives. But it doesn't just happen. It takes significant effort.
If you've ever been to a Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur service anywhere, you've probably heard the teaching that we are supposed to do t'shuvah one day before we die. And since we do not know when that day will be, we are meant to do t'shuvah every day. It's a beautiful teaching that really gets right to the essence of Judaism. And yes, getting to know ourselves and each other is a major component to t'shuvah.
But the truth is, very few of us live like that, doing the intense work of t'shuvah every day. This is precisely why we need these High Holidays. We need the sounds of the piercing shofar to wake us out of our 'I-It' complacency. We need these special days filled with prayers and song and shofar and majesty and community. They motivate us to do the work that we need to do.
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The Torah commands us to love each person as yourself. This isn't only a mandate for kindness and open-mindedness. It's the theological bedrock for relationships: You are made in the image of God and I am made in the image of God. We do a disservice to God and to ourselves if we relegate our relationships to the world of 'I-It.'
So, the next time you are shopping at Kroger or Publix, instead of being on your phone, look at the cashier and ask him or her how their day is going. When you're downtown and a panhandler asks for money that you may not want to give, you can look them in the eye and say, I'm sorry, I'm not able to help you today, but I hope you have a good day. These might seem like small gestures, but they makes all the difference. Paraphrasing Buber, we need to recognize the thou in every person we come across.
Here's the good news: the work is doable. It takes effort, and it's challenging, but all of us can do it. God made the covenant with Abraham and all of his descendants. We are part of that covenant, the ultimate I-thou. All we have to do is answer one question: Who are you?
