Rabbi Ain’s Rosh Hashanah Day 1 Sermon 5784/2023
Rosh Hashanah Day 1 2023
Rabbi Rachel Ain, Sutton Place Synagogue
“What happens when inventions don’t match our intentions?”
When do you think that God said “oy vey, what have I done?” At what point, do you think that God realized that God made a mistake in creating the world? Yes, you heard me. On this day of Rosh Hashanah, where we celebrate the creation of the world, we must acknowledge, that there came a moment where God looked out, and felt that something had gone terribly wrong.
If we look at the book of Genesis, right near the beginning, we read: The Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. 6 And the Lord regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened. 7 The Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created — men together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them.” 8
This is awful. Can you imagine working so hard for something, only to look back and regret either that it was done or how it was now being enacted wasn’t your intention?
I can imagine that this would be painful.
Two of the biggest movie hits this summer, Oppenheimer and Barbie, dealt with this exact question (amongst others of course)
Both films forced viewers to consider, what happens when our inventions aren’t used as we intended. Now of course, that could be a simplistic reading, certainly of Oppenheimer and the Atomic bomb. We have to assume that he knew it was going to be used….but maybe he didn’t think it would be used twice.
Further, as Christopher Nolan said in an interview with NPR, “But as with so much in science, the real knowledge comes from experimentation. This is the nature of science - you know, it moves forward, continually correcting itself. Science is not a process whereby you are able to sit down and perfectly map everything out in theoretical terms and then that just becomes the future. It has to interact with the real world. And to a certain extent, our film is about the consequences of that.”
With Ruth Handler and Barbie, maybe her intention was to create a doll which could help young girls imagine that they could grow up to be anything they wanted, beyond just mothers (for those who sought that), but what many women and men saw instead, was a symbol of something they could never reach-or didn’t exist-, and this caused pain for women through the generations.
So how do we understand this for today as we think about these stories as models where where our actions don’t match our intentions.
Christopher Nolan continued in his interview, I mean, this is the thing - there are technological innovations being unleashed on the world. … a lot of the researchers in AI talk about this as their Oppenheimer moment, and they're looking at historians sort of saying, OK, what are the responsibilities of a researcher or a scientist bringing something into the world that may have unintended consequences?
Rabbis have taken up this question as well. As Rabbi Danny Nevins said, “In my 2019 responsum for the CJLS, I focused first on topics related to AI-governed autonomous machines. Who is responsible for damage caused by a self-driving vehicle? How might we integrate Jewish ethical and legal norms into the operating systems of these machines? What moral rules should govern autonomous weapons systems?”
Of course, neither Oppenheimer or Handler or Mattell intended to cause people pain, neither did God!
But nothing is pareve, or neutral, in life. Everything we do has consequences and as we think about these movies, to me, they are in many ways, teshuva for the actions of the 20th-century
What do I mean? During the second half of the 20th century, we thought we had reached the pinnacle of civilization-from the depths of WWII at least until the mid 60s, the US seemed to have emerged as the “best”. I know I thought it as a kid. I didn’t seen anything wrong with the world around me. (That shows the bubble i grew up in) Now, there were many reasons for that, and I certainly don’t like that kids today feel tremendous angst, and yet, they have a more honest, more nuanced understanding of their communities, the country, and the world.
But teaching and engaging with this complexity doesn’t mean that we destroy the world that has been created, and it doesn’t mean we don’t look at what was gained…but it does mean that just like the movies forced a reckoning, it is ok for us to have conversations that are hard.
In fact, one of our new members, John Podhoretz: wrote in a review, of Oppenheimer that it does a beautiful job posing the key question of his life without answering it: In doing something transcendently great, did he do something evil?
And so I would add, And if the impact of our actions were negative, how do we deal with that?
And the inverse-what happens when something great emerges from someone whose personal actions are inherently evil-can we separate the creation from the creator? How do we understand legacy?
But these questions don’t only apply to inventions, both the existential ones like the atomic bomb and the seemingly frivolous, ones like Barbie, they also apply to our world. When I think about my two homelands, the United States and Israel, I am deeply proud and often deeply pained, two emotions that can exist simultaneously, but require a thoughtful look.
Like the movies themselves, which provide an opportunity for teshuva for the inventors, I believe that we are living at a time, and through a moment, where people are wondering, what were the intentions of the founders of our homelands, where are we now, and where are we headed. While I know that we won’t come to full policy agreements in this room about either country, what I can imagine is, that for most, the notion of the declaration of independence of both countries feels compelling, even if with 20/20 hindsight the implementation has been a challenge. And at the same time, we can recognize that we haven’t achieved the lofty goals outlined in either of the documents. So we can love an idea and be challenged by how it has come to be lived out.
The words in 1776:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--...
And of course the words in 1948 have their challenges as well-not in what was written but in how they have been fully executed.
ERETZ-ISRAEL-
..
THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
If Only. If Only the words written then were so easily executed. BUT-just because the intention was what we hoped for, and the reality isn’t, doesn’t mean we can’t keep engaging with the idea. We need to think it through-
We know we are struggling-
So how can we both pro-the idea and challenged by the reality-
A colleague of mine wrote recently, Rabbi Aaron Brusso,
I never really understood what it meant to be “pro-Israel”….
All I know is that what I feel right now is like:
going to bed worried your child is still breathing in their crib…
waiting to get a letter from them while they’re at camp…
watching them back the car out of the driveway…
saying goodbye to a spouse as they get on a plane…
seeing your parent become more vulnerable as they age…
waiting for your spouse’s results from the doctor…
letting go of the bike as your child pedals…
worrying that the person they have given their heart to will break it…
I don’t know if that’s “pro-Israel,” but it’s how I feel.
And quite frankly, it’s no different with the US-
One of the great TV shows of the 2010s, which aired in 2012, so this isn’t a commentary on any of the current people running for president, was Newsroom with the actor, Jeff Daniels. During the pilot episode, he was on a panel, as a journalist, sitting between someone who was supposed to represent the left and the right. They were each asked as question: Why is America the greatest country on earth?
After trying to give pithy answers he was pushed by the moderator and he said the following
Will McAvoy : It's not the greatest country in the world, professor. That's my answer.
Will McAvoy : ... It sure used to be. We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons. … We reached for the stars. We aspired to intelligence… First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.
But it could be.
MIC DROP. Now of course, his monologue had all the elements of a TV moment, but it raised the question-not, was America ever the greatest country on earth (BECAUSE THERE WERE ALWAYS ISSUES, LET’S BE HONEST), but rather, is America fulfilling it’s ideals?
And despite the critique of both homeland, they are mine and I care deeply about both.
Like Israel, like America, like Barbie, like Oppenheimer…we need to ask, have we reached the potential of what we set out to and just as important, are we doing something that we didn’t mean to…And if the answers aren’t what we want them to be, what do we do about that? What actions can we take to repair our past?
“Alfred Nobel, a chemist, engineer, inventor, businessman, and philanthropist from Sweden made numerous significant contributions to the field of science, holding a total of 355 patents during his lifetime. Dynamite was one of his most famous inventions, but unfortunately the invention got him the title of “merchant of Death”. Many saw his invention, which Alfred thought would end all wars, as a highly lethal product. When Alfred’s brother Ludvig died in 1888, a French newspaper accidentally published an obituary for Alfred that referred to him as the “merchant of death.” As soon as Alfred read the obituary, he decided to rewrite his Will. Afraid to leave such a legacy behind, he decided to donate more than 90 percent of his life earnings to create a symbol of respect and honor for the people who contributed to the betterment of mankind. The symbol was named after Alfred Nobel’s name, the Nobel Prize. The prize had initially five categories, which were, chemistry, physics, medicine or physiology, literature, and peace. Later in the year 1969, Economics was also added as a category for the Nobel Prize.”
How do we understand why something was built and when it goes wrong how do we adjust
We need to realize that we won’t fix problems overnight but we need to strive for goodness even if we can’t access perfection.
And let’s be honest-countries, families, individuals, are far from perfect but we try not to turn our backs on them-but we speak and share opinions; we don’t stand idly by when we see injustice
We, like Adam and Eve, or dare I say Barbie and Ken, could have stayed in Eden or Barbieland, and not encountered the real world by tasting knowledge, understanding mortality…but once we did, once we took that bite, once we open our eyes, it is incumbent upon us to begin to repair what we see as broken, a step in the teshuva process.
Now, we never know where our lives would take us when we first start out-recently, someone turned to me and said, you know, last week would have been my 51st wedding anniversary. But they had gotten divorced and that person’s life took them in a different direction…
We Never know where our lives are going to take us but we always have an opportunity to rebuild if they aren’t where we want them to be:
And we see this with loss, we see this with pain, we see this when we clearly look at what is around us.
When I was a kid I used to read choose your own adventure books-If we chose one answer, we would go to one page, and another answer, a different page. Maybe the authors of this book knew the teaching in Pirke Avot, that “everything is foreseen but freedom of choice is granted.” While at the end of the day, God might know where we will end up, it isn’t predesitned. It is up to us to have ideas and opinions, and when we need to reflect and make changes, that is what we should do. It isn’t a sign of weakness but a sign of strength.
When God created the world, God didn’t expect to destroy it. But here was the thing. God didn’t wipe it out completely. Close to complete, yes. Close enough that after the flood, God created a rainbow as a symbol of God’s teshuva, that God will never go so far again. But we do know that:
“ But Noah found favor with the Lord.”
Even God had to start fresh-
But God did so with the essence of God’s creation, humanity. Yes, it took time to rebuild, and yes there was a lot of work to be done and there is a lot of work to do, but God didn’t give up.
Rather, there was an understanding that to move forward, there needs to be a look back.
That is teshuva.
Teshuva, is saying, maybe things aren’t as they should be but it doesn't mean that they are where they will be forever.
Teshuva is saying that maybe I was wrong but I can be right in the future
Teshuva is saying, I intended to be right but the results were wrong.
Maybe it was on purpose. Maybe we really meant to hurt someone
Maybe it was by accident-we said something that we didn’t even know that we said
Maybe it was to ourselves-where we took the fork in the road that wasn’t the right one…
Teshuva is a return, a re-tracing of our steps to be able to make different choice next year or to repair the ones we made last year.
Maya Angelou was interviewed by Oprah on her 70 something birthday. Oprah asked her what she thought of growing older. And there, on the television she said it was exciting. She said I’ve learned that no matter what happens or how mad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she handles these three things: A rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas lights. She said that she has learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life and that life sometimes give you a second chance.
During these 10 days of teshuvah, we should think about the hard act of teshuvah, the hard act of making changes in our lives, to make sure that we are living the life the way we want it to be lived.
Teshuvah is one of the greatest gifts God has given to us, especially knowing that there will be questions at the end of our lives we will need to answer. Why is teshuvah important? Because it means that we can write a new answer before the end of our life. We don’t need to depend only on what we did, but rather, what we have the potential to do, even when things are hard.
How can we do that this year? The first way is by reaching out and talking to people-your loved ones, your friends, your colleagues-people you know, and maybe even people you don’t know. Then, be ready to listen to them
Rabbi Shammai Kanter, a Conservative Rabbi, told the story that he was once bicycling on the first day of summer and he passed a church bulletin board that carried the message, “If you are headed in the wrong direction, God allows U-turns.” He writes, that is a perfectly good translation for our term “teshuvah”, which literally means turning around. That’s why, in the Unetaneh Tokef, when we pray about a good life, the first thing we mention is teshvuah, the ability to recognize when we’ve gone off course, and the courage to make a U-turn, and head in the right direction again.
And of course, we know that sometimes, we are disappointed, even if it isn’t our fault. I share the following, a “love letter to the world that may or may not deserve it,” as it was written by Rabbi Harold Kushner, one of the greatest theologians and rabbis of the 20th and 21st centuries. He wrote something worth sharing this morning, as we celebrate the creation of the world.
“A Love Letter to A World that May or May Not Deserve It.”
Dear World, We’ve been through a lot together over the past eight decades, you and I – marriages, births, deaths, fulfillment and disappointment, war and peace, good times and hard times. There were days when you were more generous to me than I could possibly have deserved. And there were days when you cheated me out of things I felt I was entitled to. There were days when you looked so achingly beautiful that I could hardly believe you were mine, and days when you broke my heart and reduced me to tears.
But with it all, I choose to love you. I love you, whether you deserve it or not (and how does one measure that?). I love you in part because you are the only world I have. I love you because I like who I am better when I do.
But mostly, I love you because loving you makes it easier for me to be grateful for today and hopeful about tomorrow. Love does that.
Faithfully yours, Harold Kushner
There will be people, there will be ideas, there will be actions, there will be moments that have disappointed us in the past and if we are honest with ourselves, we might have been the cause of that pain as well for others.
But what we learn from God, what we learn from the movies of the summer, what we learn from, the late Rabbi Harold Kushner, is that seeing where things went wrong doesn’t mean we have to completely start over, but it means listening to one another, listening to ourselves, and figuring out how will we live in this world that makes it the world with celebrating, on this Rosh Hashanah, this day of creation. Because we don’t give up on the world, and we don’t give up on ourselves, because even in their imperfections, both are worthy of their existence.
Shanna Tova.
