Kol Nidre 5769--Loving Our Neighbors

Posted at 11:34 AM, Monday, October 13, 2008

Two years ago, you will remember that I delivered what might possibly have been the shortest High Holy Day sermons in recorded history. There were two reasons for this phenomenon: one was that I had landed in Adelaide exactly a week before Rosh Hashanah and was intensely focused on finding a place to live and figuring out how to navigate my way around a supermarket. The other reason my sermons were so short was that I really didn't know what to say. Had I been speaking in the United States I knew so well, I would have had no trouble choosing topics I felt passionate about. Here I was a brand new Australian, with little idea of what the political issues of the day were, no really familiarity with Australian culture, and the barest knowledge that I would soon be hearing a lot about a mysterious game called Australia Rules Football. What I knew about Australia I had learned from reading those few stories that crept into American newspapers, from watching Priscilla, Queen of the Desert several times, and from my week long visit to Adelaide the previous May. I remained utterly ignorant about what Australia was really about, and so felt at a loss to find topics that would be meaningful to my brand new congregation.

          We celebrated the two year anniversary of our arrival to this country on September 15, and I now feel considerably more comfortable speaking about life in Australia—or at least, life in South Australia. I've learned to make a booking at a restaurant rather than a reservation and to bank a cheque rather than deposit it. I can say “No worries!” with the best of them, and I find myself doing just that at least a dozen times a day. I roast pumpkin regularly, and even eat Vegemite on occasions. But I still have moments when I feel starkly out of place here.

          I thought of entitling this sermon “Loving your neighbour as yourself.” This verse from Leviticus 19 is part of the tomorrow afternoon's Torah reading, and many rabbis have elevated it as the most significant teaching in the Torah. The word normally translated as “your neighbour” is a tricky one. Re'echa doesn't exactly mean neighbour, but rather one who is close to you. “Fellow” is another translation for this term. Either way, the word refers to someone who is not a blood relation but is an intimate part of your life. Certainly neighbours have often fit into this category.

          For seven years, my family and I lived in the down-and-out town of Ambridge, Pennsylvania. Most of the homes had been built by the American Bridge Company to house its workforce in the 1920s. The 1100 street of Maplewood Avenue where we lived contained forty homes on tiny blocks. I could stand in my little backyard and look into the backyards of at least fifteen other homes without even standing on a chair. You could euphemistically call it an intimate living situation. Of course, we all knew each other. The elderly woman across the street kept a close eye on our lives and commented whenever we had out-of-town guests. Our grumpy neighbour next door was surprisingly delighted when we asked if we could pick cherries from her sour cherry tree. Our other next-door neighbours spent hours on hot summer evenings sitting on their front porch to see if anything interesting might happen. The mildly retarded man down the street who lived with his elderly mother set up dozens of movement-triggered Halloween decorations each October that roared, cackled, and shrieked through the whole month. When an alcoholic neighbour died suddenly in his thirties, a collection was taken up on the street to help defray the funeral expenses. You may be shocked to hear it, but we occasionally pushed our kids out the door and watched them run around the corner to visit with their friends on the street behind ours. In the summer, neighbourhood kids as young as five-years-old ran up and down the streets. Even in America, you won’t find many places like that anymore.

          Now we live in lovely Parkside and really don't know our neighbours. I finally introduced myself to the young couple living on one side of us, but I had to stand on a chair to see over the fence separating the two properties. That house is a new courtyard home, designed with the garage facing the street so that it's virtually impossible to tell if anyone is at home. When the house was put up for sale, the sole indication that it was still inhabited was that the rubbish bins went out every Wednesday night. I have absolutely no idea who lives in the house on the other side of us. It is completely surrounded by those two meter fences which I'm told are a special feature of life in Adelaide. I've never seen anyone go in or come out of the house. We know that there are children who live in our neighbourhood, because we hear them laughing and playing in the yard. But the high fences mean that we don't know which homes are their's. I feel relatively confident that if I knocked on a door and introduced myself, I would be greeted with a shocked stare. I would appreciate the opportunity to love my neighbour as myself, but first I have to know who my neighbour is.

          One of the preconceptions I had of Australians was that they were a very friendly people. In general, I have found this to be true. Australians in the Post Office, at the swimming pool, at the playground are very happy to chat with me. But they don't actually seem to be interested in finding out who I am or if there is something I need. I found this to be terribly frustrating when we first migrated and landed in the tightest housing rental market in Adelaide history. What we really needed was a real estate agent to hold our hands, sit down with us for fifteen minutes, and explain what we needed to know about renting in Australia. Instead, we had to figure it all out on our own, and we ended up making a number of mistakes. The same has proven true as we have confronted other challenges, such as finding services for our disabled son. Lots of sympathy from the professionals, but very few offers of meaningful help.

          I have developed this theory that Australians have adopted the American model of the rugged individual, but have taken it to extremes. Americans are often loathe to ask for help in difficult situations, because they don't want to be seen as weak and dependant on others. My impression of Australians on a number of occasions has been that they frown on those who seek help to the point that they don't offer assistance even if they could be helpful. In a recent example, Lesley Willis, Lynette Ninio, and I wrestled with the Customs Service over the phone and in person. We were trying to persuade them to help us fill in our customs declarations for the new prayerbooks. They kept telling us that we needed to pay $250 to hire a customs broker to fill out the forms for us. In the end, Lesley managed to convince one employee in the customs office to provide the necessary help, which took ten minutes and saved us quite a lot of money. But this was after several other customs employees had already told us they couldn't help us.

          So what happens when someone truly needs help? The original inspiration for this sermon came from a really terrible event several months back: Ori Henderson-Sapir, a member of our congregation, saw his beloved dog Mocha attacked and fatally injured by another dog. They were out on a Shabbat afternoon walking down a quiet side street when the attack happened. Ori struggled for ten minutes to tear the other dog away from Mocha, yelling for help all the while. Ultimately, only one person came out to help. When the police arrived at the scene, curious faces could be seen peering out from many windows. Of course, this is the ultimate fear when we become so absorbed in our lives that we decide that other people's problems are theirs alone. We ourselves might be in true physical danger and find almost no one willing to come to our aid.

          The same weekend that the Henderson-Sapirs underwent their terrible trauma, I heard an interview on ABC local radio that also outraged me. Carol Whitelock was interviewing Yvonne Wenham, a councilwoman from Aldinga who had made an heroic attempt to travel for two weeks using only mass transport. She had failed miserably. In the process, she had suffered a shoulder injury while boarding a bus. She was hurt wrestling her youngest child in a pusher on to the bus while her eight-year-old son lugged the shopping trolley up the steps. No other passengers offered to help them. I had a sudden flashback of the many bus rides I'd taken in Israel. Mothers with prams would always stand by the rear entrance to the bus. The driver would open the door, and several passengers would jump off the bus and lift the pram and its passenger up the stairs. The mothers never had to ask for help; it was automatically offered. It was hard for me not to contrast the unconscious caring of Israelis with the behaviour of those passengers who left this mother, her two young children, and their groceries to fend for themselves.

          At this point, I must say that the Jewish community of Adelaide is a welcome exception to the general unhelpfulness I've experienced on so many occasions. This is a wonderful community that truly looks after its members. Meals are cooked, rides are offered, the sick and elderly are visited and looked after, and help is given. Adelaide as a whole could learn much from how lovingly our members take care of each other. It is my impression that within Adelaide there are any number of communities bound together by ethnicity or religion who offer their members a home within a city that can sometimes appear cold and unfeeling. Can the warmth that is extended to those like us spread out to everyone?

          I think a tutorial in the care of others is becoming increasingly crucial. I had a bad dream last Shabbat that woke me up. Once awake, I found myself even more terrified than when I had been asleep. I was thinking about the future. I was thinking about a world in which the polar ice is melting and the seas are heating up, in which the supply of petrol is rapidly diminishing and the skies are drying up. I was thinking about the current worldwide financial crisis. How economic uncertainty has ripped the challenges of global warming from the front pages and is likely to keep political leaders from thinking seriously about the hard choices and immense funding necessary to stop a looming catastrophe. I was worried about the world I might be leaving to my two sons and to those who will come after them.

          Ultimately, if we're going to make it through, we will need to rely on each other. We will need to know our neighbours and to care deeply about their welfare. We will need to recognise how artificial are the walls we build between our properties and between each other. We will need to pool our resources, our expertise, and our passions to build a sustainable, hopeful world again. It will not be easy, but it will be what is necessary. Ultimately, even the most defiantly independent among us will need to come to the realisation that we must all rely on each other. Lately the words of American founding father Benjamin Franklin drift into my head with increasing frequency: If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately. The challenges we face as a city, as a nation, and as part of a world emperiled seem almost too great to overcome. What is clear to me is that the first step is to reach out to our friends, our community, and yes—to our neighbours. I feel blessed to be part of a community that already seems to understand this intuitively.  

          Remember the story about the man wandering lost in the forest? It comes at the start of service IV in Gates of Prayer. Shai Agnon, an Israeli writer who was awarded the Nobel prize in literature, related the tale in his 1948 work Days of Awe: “Once our master Rabbi Hayyim of Zans told a parable: a man had been wandering about in a forest for several days, not knowing which was the right way out. Suddenly he saw a man approaching him. His heart was filled with joy. “Now I shall certainly find out which is the right way,” he thought to himself. When they neared one another, he asked the man, “Brother, tell me which is the right way. I have been wandering about in this forest for several days.” Said the other to him, “Brother, I do not know the way out either. For I too have been wandering about here for many, many days. But this I can tell you: do not take the way I have been taking, for that will lead you astray. And now let us look for a new way out together.”

          Rabbi Hayyim’s point in the story is that we need to search for a new way out of the forest. But the point that I take away from the story is that we need to make the search together. So too in this era when the future is so very uncertain. We are slowly learning which ways do not lead out of the forest. Now, our sacred task is to join our hands, hearts, and minds and to search for the way out together. May we all be inscribed and sealed for a new year of joy and contentment, good health and prosperity, but most especially a new year of hope. Amen.