Parashat Ki Tisa 5769 – March 14, 2009
What the World Needs Now…
The challenges we face today are symptoms of a greater problem. Now is the time to come together and reevaluate our values and priorities.
When I meet with bar and bat mitzvah students to discuss their speeches, I give them the following advice: pick just one thing from your portion to talk about. Don’t try to cover every event and every theme in your parsha. This is, indeed, advice that I learned in rabbinical school. A good sermon has just one theme or one proposition to make – if you try to talk about more than that, people lose the train of thought. This principle, I tell my students, holds true whether you are giving a 2 minutes dvar torah at your bar mitzvah or a 20 minute High Holiday sermon. Well, this morning I’m going to break my own rule and I’m going to talk about three things… but I’m going to argue that they really are all one thing.
There is a lot of drama in this week’s parsha and many topics – among them are the makhatzit shekel (the half-shekel collected as part of the census), we read about the het ha’egel (the sin of the Golden Calf); and we find further discussion of Shabbat observance.
First, the Half Shekel: Makhazit HaShekel was one of the ways of taking a census while simultaneously collecting funds for the building of the mishkan. Rashi points out that it is inauspicious to count Jews because these types of counting invite the evil eye; so, instead of counting heads Moses collected the half shekel from each person and then he would count the money and know how many people there are. But this still begs the question: why half a shekel? Why not a whole shekel? In his commentary on this parsha, the Slonimer Rebbe (Netivot Shalom) says that the collection of the half-shekel teaches us that none of us is whole by ourselves. In order to be complete, he says, we need to be part of a community. And I think this speaks loudly to one of the ills we are facing today. You can sum up the problem in one word… iPod. Think about the word iPod – it is a Pod (a cocoon, a shell, a cubicle) for the “I” – the self. Don’t get me wrong… in some respects I love what the technology allows us to do. My iPhone is very convenient – I can carry around with me all my favorite music, videos, and podcasts. But therein also lies the problem. “I” listen to “my” music… by “myself”… through “my” noise-isolating earphones. Do you remember when we were kids and we listed to the radio… you could listen by yourself, sure, but you knew that you were listening to the same thing that perhaps thousands of other people were listening to at the same time. That’s why you had call in shows, requests, and dedications. But we don’t have that today. Each of us can be isolated from the world and other people with our iPods… and all the other things that isolate us.
The sociologist Robert Putnam wrote a book in 2000 called Bowling Alone. The title of the book comes from his research in which he found, among other interesting facts, that the number of people bowling has steadily increased over the last two decades, but involvement in bowling leagues has sharply declined. And this holds true across the board. Membership in civic organizations, clubs, social groups, political movements, and volunteer organizations has declined in the last 20 years. The byproduct of this is that we are less connected to one another. Bowling alone means you don’t have to talk with other people. You don’t have to interact… and Putnam says this is problematic for our democracy and has negative consequences for us as individuals.
As Americans we like to think of ourselves as free agents suspended outside of social networks. But the truth is we are all interdependent, even when we don’t like to admit it. We need other people: we are stronger and more effective when we come together to achieve something greater than ourselves. The mishkan could not have been built by 600,000 individuals acting independently. There are problems that are bigger than us, and we have to relearn how to collect our resources to meet these challenges.
Second: The sin of the Golden Calf is about the dangers of worshiping the visible. The Torah says that the people panicked because Moses was taking so long to come down from Mount Sinai, and they demanded that Aaron make them an idol. We human beings have a hard time with the abstract and we have a tendency to cling to what we can see and hold. But our belief in an ineffable transcendent God is supposed to teach us that there are values and principles that we cannot see that are more important than the things we can see: Love. Justice. Goodness. Obligation. Empathy. Community. Holiness. Wonder. Gratitude. Family.
Third: Shabbat. There are many places in the Torah that discuss the rules of Shabbat. One of the things that makes this iteration of Shabbat noteworthy is its placement. It comes abruptly on the heals of instructions for building the Mishkan, and the designation of Bezalel to be the general contractor for the job. And the text itself seems to be aware of this sudden shift in gears when it says, “Akh, et shabtotai tishmeru…” Rashi points out that the word Akh here means, However. “However, you must observe my Sabbaths, for it is a sign between Me and you for the generations, to know that I am HaShem, Who makes you holy.” What is the meaning of the “however” in that sentence? And why talk about Shabbat in the context of the Tabernacle? The placement of the commandment here comes to teach us that there is no labor – no matter how holy – that supersedes Shabbat. Even the building of the mishkan must be suspended to observe the Sabbath. The Torah here calls Shabbat an “ot”, a sign, and a “brit olam”, an eternal covenant, between us and God. Shabbat serves as a reminder that this world is not of our making nor do we own it. One day a week, we stand apart from the world of doing and making and changing. One day a week we stand apart from life in order to be immersed in life… to live in the world as it is and as God intended it to be. How is Shabbat a covenant? God asks us to measure our lives and our work through His eyes. Shabbat gives us the opportunity to put our work in the world into perspective. It allows us to focus on those intangibles I just mentioned.
So at the beginning of this sermon I told you that I was breaking my rule of talking about only one thing. But I want to argue that these three things are really one thing. Each of these is but a symptom of a larger problem. It is the problem of the human ego. It is the selfishness and self-centeredness that is at the root of the problems we face as a society today.
Why have we come to believe that we can as individuals survive alone? – it’s ego. We don’t think we need other people.
Why have we lost our perspective on the meaning of money and possessions? – it’s ego, again. Materialism and excessive accumulation is a kind of idolatry because these are tangible things that represent our power. The money in your wallet is a representation of your power… there’s nothing wrong with that, as such, but it becomes malignant when it is an end in itself to the exclusion of the transcendent values that are timeless and that connect us to one another and to something greater than ourselves.
And, why do we find it so hard to stop for a day? I think it is because we are afraid of confronting our selves. Every so often we need a pause to reexamine our values, to adjust our priorities.
Something else I tell my bar and bat mitzvah students is that a good sermon should have a take-away, a message that isn’t trite or obvious; and, ideally, it should give the listening something upon which to act. So here it is:
To the idea that we need one another – I say: let us not turn inward right now and say to ourselves, “the problems of others are not my problem.” Let us think boldly about how we can come together as a society. Let’s get more connected to one another, not less. It starts in our families and here at the shul, and in other civic engagements. More than ever, we need these connections. We need to be joining together in finding solutions and giving a little bit of our selves (the half-shekel).
Let’s spend some time thinking about and reevaluating what really matters to us. Let’s use these difficult times to remember that the forces that really matter in this world are the intangibles. They are the values that tie us to one another and to God.
And to do all of this, we need to stop periodically. We need to set aside doing and producing and competing. We need to quiet the noise and the distractions that pull us apart. That is what Shabbat is about.
These three things: connectedness, transcendence, and reflection are – in my humble opinion – what I think the world needs now.
Shabbat Shalom
Note: This sermon was inspired by a sermon given by Rabbi David Wolpe at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.
