Isn’t it wonderful to be gathered together for another Holiday? The days of anxious anticipation are finally over, giving way to a Holiday meant to inspire us with feelings of joy, gladness, awe and reverence for God. Many of us no doubt prepared a beautiful festive meal in honor of this, the most important of holidays, and relatives and friends came from far and wide to share together in the simcha of Jewish celebration. Now here we sit as a congregation, raising our voices together in joyful song and heartfelt prayer thanking God for creating this wonderful day. Oh yeah, and it happens to be Rosh HaShanah as well!
You see, I was only talking about Shabbat! That feeling of anticipation I get each week, the smell of the challah which greets me at my door each Friday afternoon, the feeling I get when I welcome friends and family around the dinner table, the songs, the prayers, these are things we are supposed to feel each and every week, not simply once a year. But I know, I know, life happens too quickly, sometimes it feels like there isn’t any time to stop and pay attention to ‘little old Shabbat.’
And maybe you are right. Maybe life does move too quickly these days. Monday comes with a maelstrom each week, the cell phone rings off the hook as we make our way to work. On Tuesday your blackberry won’t stop chirping as your email inbox continuously floods with incoming messages. On Wednesday you have to pick up the kids from soccer practice, then take them to their guitar lesson, then drop them off at their study group only to pick them back up again so they can get home in time to Instant Message the friends they just saw! Thursday means food shopping, dry cleaning, and the time to call your mother otherwise you will definitely hear from her tomorrow! Friday is perhaps the busiest day of all; a day to spend a couple extra hours at work in order to cross off every entry on your action item list, answer every voice mail, dot every ‘i’, cross every ‘t’ before making your way home. With work weeks like these Friday night and Saturday can so easily become the only time you have for socializing, for going out to dinner, for doing some shopping, for taking the kids to a birthday party, for taking your ‘fun’ out for an evening at Dave and Busters. Because after all, Sunday is the day you have to drop the kids off at Hebrew School, then make a quick run to Home Depot to pick up that new hedge trimmer, meet a friend for coffee, pick up the kids from Hebrew School and make it home in time for the 4:15 Patriots game, Sunday dinner, put the kids to bed and have enough energy left over to make it up to watch Entourage at 10:30 on HBO, go to bed and then wake up at 6am to start the week over again. I know, I know, with lives like these who really has time for Shabbat?
What I want to talk with you about this morning is precisely this: A world that is too busy for Shabbat is precisely a world that is in desperate need of Shabbat. A world where the line between humanity and technology is forever being blurred is a world that is in dire need of the simplicity the Sabbath has to offer. Finally, a world that is rapidly shrinking due to globalization is precisely the kind of world that is in definite need of Shabbat and its intense power of localization.
Allow me to start our conversation this morning where any normal person would choose to begin: with Ben Stein. You probably have heard of Ben Stein, a writer, a lawyer, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, perhaps made most famous by his cameo appearance in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where his monotonous repetition of the name “Beuller, Bueller,” became forever engrained in our popular culture. Why do I make mention of Ben Stein in a sermon supposedly talking about Shabbat? Simple, I mention him because I know that Ben Stein is in desperate need of The Holy Sabbath.
Last summer, I stumbled upon a piece Ben Stein wrote in the business section of The New York Times. The article was entitled: “Connected, Yes, but Hermetically Sealed.” He began his article with a quotation from the French philosopher Jean Jacque Rousseau:
“Man is born free,” Rousseau said, “but everywhere he is in chains.” No doubt a powerful quotation in Rousseau’s day, an era defined by the struggles for liberty, fraternity and equality; but one that still rings strangely true in our own world as well. Using this quote as inspiration Stein ponders:
What would Rousseau have made of the modern-day balls and chains with which we shackle ourselves? They are not made of steel or iron, but of silicon and plastic and digits and electrons and waves zooming through the air. These are the chains of all kinds of devices, like the BlackBerry, the iPhone and the Voyager. These are the chains with which we have bound ourselves, losing much of our solitude and our ability to see the world around and inside us.
But far from being a diatribe against the many wonders of technology, Stein knows, as all of us do that technology is a wondrous part of our life. It allows us, to feel connected to our fellow human beings in an instant, despite the reality of the distance that lies between us. It has allowed us to live longer, play harder and dream bigger than previous generations could even have imagined. But nonetheless, Mr. Stein manages to describe a situation, one which all of us have experienced, when we rejoice in the tiny taste of a world free from our silicon chains. He describes an ordinary couple of hours during an airplane flight:
Consider an airplane flight. We are soaring across the country. We listen to music. We read books and newspapers. We sleep and dream. . . . Maybe you talk to your neighbors. You are free to think and to reflect on existence and on your own small role in it. You are free to have long thoughts and memories of high school and college and the first time you met your future spouse.
Then, the airplane lands. Cellphones and P.D.A.’s snap into action. Long rows of lights light up on tiny little screens. These are people we absolutely have to talk to. Voice messages pour in, telling of children who got speeding tickets, of margin calls, of jobs offered and lost. The bonds of obligation, like handcuffs, are clapped back onto our wrists, and we shuffle off to the servitude of our jobs and our mundane tasks. A circuit is completed: the passengers who were human beings a few moments earlier become part of an immense, all-engulfing machine of communication and control. Human flesh and spirit become plastic and electronic machinery.
Sound familiar? How many of us present here this morning have landed on the tarmac with a jolt, breathed a sigh of relief, and then immediately reached into our pockets to turn on the cell phone? The transition Stein describes is immediate. The book we were reading disappears, the conversation we were having with the stranger to our right vanishes as quickly as the bag of roasted peanuts we inhaled during the flight; our technological world once again dominates our existence. We think to ourselves: “Well, it was nice while it lasted.”
Finally, Stein concludes his article with what many of us would consider to be a frightening thought: He writes
WHAT would we do if cellphones and P.D.A.’s disappeared? …try a day without that invasion of your privacy. Or a week. You will be shocked at what you discover. It’s called life. It’s called nature. It’s called getting to know yourself. Will we ever throw away the chains that go “ping” in our pocket? Or have we irrevocably become machines ourselves?
I think we all can relate to what Ben Stein is saying. No show of hands is necessary, but I’m curious as to how many of us are willing to admit to having a bordering on unhealthy ‘cell-phone dependence?’ The symptoms of this disease can be described as feeling inexplicably nervous upon discovering that you left your cellphone in the house, while you are out walking your dog around the block. Or perhaps you feel a phantom vibration on your thigh every three to four minutes because the nerves in your epidermis have become accustomed to the feeling of being interconnected with the world. Again, no need for a show of hands (please), but I wonder, how many of you brought your cellphones with you to Temple this morning? Why? Isn’t the entire State of Rhode Island in this building right now? More importantly who could you possibly need to speak with that is more important than the Holy One who created our ever-expanding Universe? This Temple, on this day, and on every Shabbat and every festival should be a place where we feel comfortable putting away our ubiquitous cell-phones in favor of our often neglected soul-phones.
But now I want to ask you a different set of questions, this time feel free to raise your hands to signal your affirmation.
1. How many of you admit to an overwhelming feeling of freedom upon turning off your cell-phone for a couple of hours? 2. How many of you will acknowledge that instead of feeling depressed upon discovering that no one has left you a voicemail in 24 hours, you feel a sudden rush of relief? 3. How about this one: how many of us now define the true meaning of the word ‘vacation’ to be a healthy detachment from the silicon shackles of our cell-phones, our blackberries, our iphones and our laptops? Sitting on a beach, the sun shining on our faces, no cell-phone in site, no email inbox to check, we remark to ourselves: “now this is relaxing!”
The reason why we feel relaxed, this rush of excitement as we unplug, this overwhelming feeling of inner-peace, these are the direct result of feeling in control of our time. In our increasingly technological and staggeringly global world, we human beings have lost our sense of time. And ultimately, this is what Shabbat has to offer us: reclamation of our sacred time. A time that will not be dominated by someone else’s dialing of your phone number; a time that will not succumb to the internet’s impossible demands of immediacy. A time that is wholly yours, and a Holy time, to focus your energy and attention inward: towards your community, your family and ultimately into yourself.
As you all know we live in a world of intense Globalization and technology has done us all a wonderful service in making our large, spherical globe so much smaller and so much flatter. We walk down the street while talking to someone half-way around the country; at night, using our computers we ‘skype’ or Instant Message with people half-way around the world. We send an email and in a rush it stretches across thousands of miles and appears on a computer in India. We even experienced a burgeoning political revolution in Iran this year via twitter updates. Pretty amazing actually and I, for one, am grateful for the ability to connect with my world on a global level.
But I also want to encourage us to consider the oft-neglected power of localization. When we walk down the street, talking on our cellphones to someone who is a world away, we have a tendency to miss the old woman who has her hand out for assistance. At home, we so easily reach around the world to connect with someone we sometimes forget to reach out to the very people who live in our house. We check our Facebook profiles constantly often at the expense of our real, live, flesh and blood friends.
I want to argue that Shabbat is the logical and necessary answer to this culture of globalization. The observance of Shabbat forces us to localize our focus for one day each week upon our home, our family and our community. Imagine the impact Shabbat could have upon yourself and your household if everyone paused each week to connect with each other, not across the world, but across the dinner table. Imagine if once a week your kids concentrated with wondrous intensity as they played a game, not on their computer, but on your living room floor. Imagine if for one day each week we made it our concern to check-in with our extended family, the friends who make up this wonderful village we call Temple Emanu-El. Thinking locally for one day could really make a world of difference.
I would like to conclude my sermon this morning by talking to my dear friend Ben Stein. Ben, I agree with you. I agree that although we are free we are increasingly enslaved to our work, to our cell phones and to our laptops. I agree that due to this constant need to connect on a global level we are sacrificing our ability to connect intimately with our family, with our friends and with ourselves. But Ben, I disagree with you that the only solution to this problem is a three hour plane flight.
Ben, what we need is the Sabbath. Ben we need the ritual, the institution of Shabbat in our lives each week. We need, like Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “To set apart one day a week for freedom…a day for being with ourselves…a day of independence from external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature.” “Is there any institution” Heschel asks, that holds out a greater hope for the progress of the Human race than the Sabbath? I don’t think there is.
I hope Ben is listening, and I hope all of you are listening as well. We have the power. We have the power to control our own time, to take dominion over our lives. We have the power to turn every Friday into holiday, to turn every Shabbat into that overwhelming sensation of ‘vacation.’ It is easy to feel this power. All we have to do….is turn the power off.
Shabbat Shalom, oh yeah, and Shanah Tovah.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment