Severance, Stephen King, and Love

Yom Kippur, 2022

Friends, this is the sermon I delivered yesterday. Wishing each of you joy and peace.

There is a story about a university alum who was invited back to campus years after graduation and given the chance to meet the university president. As she was introduced to the now-elderly president, she took him aside and said,

“Sir, I will be forever grateful to you for the words you said to me on my graduation day as you handed me my diploma. Over the course of my life, there have been ups and there have been downs, and thank God, things have turned out well for me.

But in the dark moments, it was the wisdom you shared with me that graduation day as you gave me the diploma that has sustained me throughout.”

The university president was at a loss. He turned to the woman saying, “I am humbled by your kindness, but I have presided over decades of graduations handing out more diplomas to more people than I can count. I don’t remember. Please tell me – what was it that I said to you?”

The woman looked at him and replied, “ As I walked onto the platform and you handed me the diploma, you looked right at me and said: "Keep moving."

It's true, though, isn't it? We get sick. We lose loved ones. We get hurt. We need to keep moving.

But the Torah asks us to do a little more. As we keep moving, we need to keep growing, putting our best foot forward, not just surviving but thriving.

That's our task. You see, we can look at the world in multiple ways. The Greek Hellenistic view of the world was as a recurring cycle. The four seasons repeat themselves over and over.

Life, from this perspective, is like a circle. We may seem to move forward, but we inevitably fall back. Greek tragedies play on this theme with the inevitable fateful ending. Oedipus Rex, for example, is destined to murder his father and marry his mother. It is fated.

It is inevitable. So are our lives. There is nothing we can do. We keep going, but we don't decide the destination. This is the tragic viewpoint of life.

But Hebrew does not have any word for tragedy. Modern Hebrew had to borrow from English, tragedia. That's not to say there is no word for sadness. Of course there is. But we do not believe in inevitable fate.

In Judaism, our destiny is not preprogrammed. Our view of history and life is linear rather than circular. We are moving forward. We may fall back. Often we do.

We may take three steps forward and five steps back. But over time, we progress. We just need to keep going up the mountain, toward the promised land.

But as I talked about ten days ago, we can't do it alone. We need each other. But we also need that Torah: its message, its guidance, its values. Which of those values do we need most right now?

The first is Zachor, memory. We are what we remember. It is our character. This year I subscribed to Apple TV for one specific purpose: to watch the series called Severance. I imagine some of you saw it. Of course, the acting was incredible: John Turtararo and Christopher Walken. But the story made us think about the role of memory.

Severence is about several characters who undergo a procedure called severance. The procedure creates two people out of one.

They look the same and have the same name, but when they are at work, they have no memories of who they are outside of work.

When they are outside of work, they have no memories or ideas of what they do every day from nine to five. In other words, they have two separate selves: one exists in the workplace. And one outside of it. The characters know they have undergone the procedure, but the work character knows nothing about the home character and vice versa.

The show raises so many questions aside from the great drama. Who is the real us? The work self or home self? How do we know what is important to us when we don't know who we are? How do we deal with pain?

See, the main character voluntarily underwent severance when his wife was killed in a car accident. His memories were so painful that he decided he wanted to have to deal with them 24/7, so he split his work self and home self.

His work self has no idea that his other self is a widower. That was his way of dealing with loss. He kept moving, but he moved the wrong way.

How do we deal with it? Do we try to forget? Do we try to separate, to compartmentalize, to sever? Do we keep going but without a compass? I confess--remember, it is Yom Kippur--that I do.

I'm a pretty optimistic guy, and my natural way of dealing with loss is just to move on. Try to forget myself in business or reading or working on another project. But I've come to think of this tendency as a spiritual bypass.

It's a way of avoiding pain, of difficulty, of growth. That is not what our tradition instructs.

Rather, we remember. We recall. We acknowledge the loss and the pain. But we don't stop there. We also remember the joy, connection, and feelings.

My grandfather passed several years ago away on my birthday, and that was painful, and when I remember my grandfather, I feel a hole in my heart, of course. But I also hear the sound of the chair when he would come to our house for dinner growing up.

He was a tall guy, and the chair was not that big, so when he pulled it and sat down, I heard a kind of pounding sound on the floor. Picturing that chair and remembering that sound lifts my heart.

Or I recall the smell of brisket and matza ball soup when all of my grandparents and family sat around the table for Passover.
Just imagining that smell brings back old memories and joyful times. Of course, there is a tinge of sadness. But that's what makes good memories even more powerful.

I think of observing a yahrzeit as an embodiment of these complex feelings. On a yahrzeit, we recall a loss. It can be painful.

I have looked into the eyes of so many people in this room as they observed a first yahrzeit—or a 30th yahrzeit—with pain and longing.

But when do we observe yahrzeit? On Shabbat. Shabbat is a time of joy. Shabbat is a day of life, of living at our best.

When we come for yahrzeit on Shabbat, the ups and downs of life come together. We struggle to see with both eyes. We see the pain, and we also see the inner strength to grow.

The second value to guide us today is connected to memory. In fact, it is what sustains memory and gives it power. It is love.

Sometimes we think of love as purely a Christian idea. Judaism is about law, the old comparison goes, and Christianity is about love. Absolutely not. Think about our veahavta prayer. v'ahavta et adonai elochecha, love the eternal your God.

Or vahavta l'reacha kamocha, love your neighbor as yourself. Love is the invisible force powering our relationships, our friendships, our commitments.

And love will keep us moving. Both literally and figuratively.

My dad had a pacemaker put in this past year, and he told me something his doctor told him. By the time you reach age 75, your heart has beaten three billion times.

How remarkable! We have to keep going in life. And the heart makes that possible. It is always moving, giving and receiving all day, every day. It keeps moving.

Like the heart, in Judaism, love is not simply a thing. It is a verb, a doing. The opening words of our v'ahavta prayer tell us how to do it. v'ahavrta et adoinai elohecha, b'kol levavhca, v'nefshecha, v'chol meodecha.

B'kol Levavcha, with all your heart: We already saw our heart works. It makes life possible. And the sound of the shofar we heard on Rosh Hashanah and will hear again at the end of today, is like the cry of the heart. It awakens us, calls us to love with all our hearts.

When we hear the shofar at the end of today, imagine it is your heart calling you to a renewed life. A great Hasidic rebbe known as the Sefat Emet said it's not enough on the days of awe to hear the sound of the shofar.

We have to hear kol shofar, the voice of the shofar, the inner voice, the heart, inside of us, calling us to goodness and love.

Now b'kol nafshecha, with all our soul. This is the love of connection. It is the kind where we feel a kinship, a trust, a sense of being at home with another person.

This person may be our spouse, it may be a friend, it may be a parent. It may be God. As I said ten days ago, no one is alone. That is a core message we need to hear.

The love, the trust, the faith of another can do wonders for us. This message has hit home throughout my life, from my parents, to my wife to those who have lifted me up by allowing me to serve as a rabbi.

That's what we need. The love and trust of others. A few years ago I read the great book On Writing by Stephen King. It's chock full of wonderful writing tips and inspiration. But one story stood out to me.

King is talking about his first novel. He had the idea to write about a high school girl with strange psychic powers. He finished a draft and was frustrated. He threw away his manuscript.

Now, this was before word processors, so it was actually a typed manuscript from a typewriter. He threw it out and got up from his desk and went for a walk.

He was depressed, ready to give up on his desire to become a writer. While he was out, his wife--they had just been recently married--saw it in the trash. She picked up and started reading.

By the time he got back from his walk, she had read a chunk of the manuscript and said you cannot give up. Yes, it needed some edits and rewrites, but it had makings of a great novel.

When he said no, I can't write about the experience of a high school teenager, she said I'll help you, but you cannot give up. So he did not, and that book became Carrie, the enormous success that eventually became a hit film and musical.

And of course we know what happened with Stephen King, who became one of the most successful writers of all time. Love made that confidence and transformation possible.

The last expression of love, v'kol meodecha: with all our strength. You know, today, we need strength. Now I'm not referring to physical strength. We're not eating anything.

It's an inner strength. It is what Martin Luther King called the strength to love.
Dr. King gave African Americans the strength to love in a world so filled with hate. And today it feels we all need some of that strength. We need strength to stay loving in a world filled with so much hate.

In particular, as we gather in this synagogue, I think of the strength we need in our Jewish identity.

Antisemitism has not been as frequent in this country in over 70 years! Just this past January, a terrorist took four Jews at prayer hostage in a synagogue in Texas. One of them was my good friend Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker.

To counter antisemitism, we need the strength to love. I do not need the strength to love antisemites. That's not our ideal. Rather, it is the strength to love our Judaism. Strength to love the Jewish people, pride in our tradition, our heritage, our community.

It's time to show our love. I watched the recent CNN special on antisemitism. It was excellent, but the related interview with Dana Bash--the Reform Jewish journalist who hosted show--was even better.

Bash talked in her interview and wrote about her son. He is ten, and he asked a few weeks before Chanukah if he could have a Jewish star to wear. Bash is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. She grew up confident but quiet in her Judaism.

The goal was to become American, to not stand out as Jews.
Now her son wanted to stand out. She said she ignored the request initially. But then when Chanukah came, and he asked again. And here's what she wrote:

"To hear this come out of my young son's mouth was jaw dropping. That he takes such pride in his religion -- one preserved and practiced for thousands of years through countless generations of my family -- made me incredibly emotional.

I immediately thought of my great grandparents and aunt -- Hungarian Jews who were not particularly observant but were murdered by the Nazis during World War II anyway.

I thought of my grandparents, who escaped the Nazis and miraculously made it to the US only two months before Pearl Harbor. They became patriotic Americans who never took for granted the ability to practice their Judaism freely.

Without knowing enough to make those connections, my son was asking to take up that mantle because it is in his soul and in his heart."

His heart: he had the strength to love. That's the strength to love we all need.

There is an old custom on Yom Kippur to light a memorial candle in the evening, before Kol Nidre service. The candle burns through the day.

But there is also a lesser-known custom to also light a second candle, ner bari, for the living. The candle sits alongside the memorial candle. Why? Because on Yom Kippur we are looking at ourselves from the outside in. We are re-membering who we are capable of being!

(Light Large Candle)

It's time to turn on our lights. Let them shine with love, memory, and strength.

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