Once upon a time, a great moral teacher, the Chofetz Chayim, was being driven in a wagon. The driver noted that they were passing through a wheat field, filled with sheaves of harvested wheat. “Wonderful,” the driver said, seeing no one around, “we can have some wheat to share along the way.” He jumped down from the wagon, told the Chofetz Chayim to keep watch, and went to steal the wheat. “Someone is watching!” yelled the Chofetz Chayim, “Someone is watching!” In a panic, the driver dropped the wheat, hopped into the wagon, and spurred the horses. Once up to speed, he turned around to see who was in pursuit. And saw no one.
I thought you said someone is watching,” said the angry driver.
“I did,” said the Chofetz Chayim. “I did say someone is watching, Because,” pointing up, “Someone is always watching.”
“Someone is always watching.”
Now you might think this tale quaint, a superstition from a bygone age. First of all, many of us doubt that there is a Someone to do the watching. And second, we take umbrage at the idea that anyone may be watching. It’s almost insulting, an infringement on our freedom. After all, we’re supposed to be able to do anything we want without some moral judge, or even some conscience, looking over our shoulder. Aren’t we?
Besides, we know better. We know how easy it is to be completely anonymous, to do things without being seen. We understand the anonymity of the big city, and the anonymity of the online world. What the driver couldn’t do, we can do with ease, and in a thousand ways. Nothing is beyond our grasp, and in the end, we will be able to say, “I did it my way.”.
Or so might you think. But if that’s what you really think, if you think no one is watching, if you think that conscience and moral judgment is a thing of the past, if you think you can get away with just about anything, I have just two words for you.
Ashley Madison.
Ashley Madison, in case you haven’t already heard of it, is a website devoted to the promotion of adultery. It invites people, under the cloak of guaranteed anonymity—I love those words, guaranteed anonymity—to betray the most precious relationship in their life because, as they phrase it, “Life is short. Have an affair.” Their tagline, duly copyrighted. About advertising contracts, the adultery website is very conservative.
I’m not going to dwell on the moral depravity of Ashley Madison, other than to note, number one, that it was founded by a Jew who should be ashamed of himself; number two, that sophisticated apologetics aside, it has as much moral rectitude as Murder Inc., it’s moral neighbor, representing as they do the violation of the 6th and 7th of the 10 commandments; and number three, pretensions of “egalitarian liberated” sexuality aside, it turns out that 98% of the 40 million members are men.
But the reason I mention Ashley Madison today is because the Ashley Madison data base—built on the promise of guaranteed anonymity, which is simply another way of saying that no one is watching—the Ashley Madison data base was hacked, and its contents exposed.
In other words, the list of men who wanted to cheat on their wives is now open for all to see. Trust me, all over the world there were guys running around like cockroaches in a suddenly lit room, trying to shut down every computer they could find—or more accurately, every computer their wife could find.
They thought that simply erasing history on their computers was enough.
They were wrong. And, forgive me, I don’t shed a single tear for them. What can they do? Complain about breach of contract? That’s rich, considering what they were trying to do. Someone was watching, and we should celebrate that fact. Because moral anonymity is a profound threat to a decent society. Character is what you do when no one is watching, and none of us has a character so sterling that it could afford the test of anonymity. I believe, and, more important, the Torah teaches, that to become moral we must participate in a society actively devoted to fostering morality.
In a society, in other words, where someone is watching.
In the story of the Chofetz Chayim, and, lehavdil, separating the sacred from the profane, the story about Ashley Madison, people found out they were being watched almost immediately. But it usually isn’t like that.
Memory is another form of watching—arguably, the most important form of watching. It’s certainly the one that lasts the longest. I want to share something with you about memory, something I’ve been thinking about all year long. You know, when we pour our hearts out in the Yizkor service, we talk about our loved ones who meant so much to us. We talk about them in glowing terms: parents who watched over us, nursed us, guided us, spouses with whom we were truly united, and so on. And often, perhaps usually, these accolades are well-deserved. But what if the people we remember are people about whom we cannot in good conscience say these things? I’ve done funerals for people who were entirely estranged from their families. For parents who had abused their children. For spouses that hadn’t spoken to each other for years. For brothers that sued each other over the business. They’re excruciating. Whether it was due to substance abuse, or anger-management issues, or complete psychosis, or some deep dark secret, or just being a miserable human being—whatever it was, people don’t always live their lives like someone is watching, much less watching for year after year after year. And for those who remember people like this, memory is an ongoing mourning for a relationship that never was, or that ceased to be.
Whenever I find myself dealing with such a situation, two questions go through my mind. The first is, how could Yizkor possibly be of comfort to someone with memories like these? And the second question is, what could we do with our own lives to ensure that things never go so terribly wrong?
Looking back first—as Jews, we always look back first—I would like to share with you a perspective that comes from the Mussar Movement, the part of Judaism devoted to personal ethical development. Mussar rabbis maintain that there are two different parts to our soul, the nefesh and the neshamah. The neshamah—you might have heard the expression “a gute neshumah”—is the part of our soul that is always connected to its divine source. It’s a part of G-d within us. The nefesh, by contrast, is the part of our soul devoted to life in this world—life with all its tensions, all its challenges, all its successes but also all its failures. The neshamah is always pristine, always calm, always divine. It is the part of us that is created in G-d’s image, constantly and serenely connected to the wholeness of existence. One could even say that the neshamah is us, the way we are supposed to be. The nefesh, in contrast, is anything but serene, anything but constant. It is engaged in endless struggle, animating us to meet the challenges of our daily existence—economic challenges, emotional challenges, physical challenges, societal challenges. Where the neshamah is in a never ending state of fullness, the nefesh grapples with a never ending to-do list. The neshamah is always good. That’s why the expression “a gute neshumah” is something of a misnomer. All neshumas are gute neshumas. But with “a gute neshumah,” it’s easy to see how good, how divinely good, it is.
In this context, I mention in passing that Yogi Berra has just passed away. Talk about a gute neshamah! And all over Brooklyn, you can hear people saying the same thing, “I was a Dodgers fan all my life, but there was one Yankee I liked… (but Jackie Robinson was safe).”
So with “a gute neshumah,” it’s easy to see how good, how divinely good, it is. For the rest of us, not so much. Instead, people see our nefesh, which is like a garment bearing all the tears and scratches of a long journey. The path the nefesh will take is unpredictable, subject both to our own choices and to the dictates of fate. Let me tell you two stories. When I was serving in Sweden, I was called to perform a funeral for a person I did not know, a person of whom I had never heard. And it was explained to me that this was a holocaust survivor, who came to Sweden at the end of the war. She was so traumatized by the torture she had gone through that she went into the little apartment she had been given, locked the door, and never left for 40 years. A congregant would put a bag of food in front of her door and walk a safe distance away, and then the door would open, a bone thin arm would come out, quickly grab the food, and the door would close.
Another one of my congregants survived 3 concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He moved to Sweden and married the haberdasher’s daughter. The made a remarkable couple. She was almost 6 feet tall, he was a portly 5’4”. When they walked down the street, they looked like the number 10. He—his name was David Ladow, z”l—loved every single moment of life, milked it for all it’s worth. He eventually built up the business, got into tie manufacturing, Atlas ties, which I always thought was funny because of his diminutive stature, and eventually he landed the Disney franchise for ties. One year, he and his wife Susie went to Disney World, for the annual Disney Corporate Convention. And they announced the Disney franchise of the year award went to Atlas ties of Gothenburg, Sweden. Unbelievable.
For both of these survivors, the path their nefesh took was completely unpredictable. In her youth, the recluse had surely not envisioned her life as a scarred and traumatized refugee. And the tie manufacturer couldn’t have conceived of a path that would lead from Auschwitz to Disneyworld. For heavens sake, Hollywood couldn’t dream up something so improbable. What happened to them in this world, and how they responded to it, is beyond our understanding. And the same is true for all of us. The mentally ill do not choose to be mentally ill. The substance abusers do not choose to be junkies. And even in matters were there is choice—being an abuser, or even just being a miserable human being—there are paths that took us there, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps as the result of external circumstances, perhaps as a result of a long and tortuous series of horrible choices. In some cases, of course, a real sickness is involved, where people are simply out of control. But there were all sorts of enablers, and bystanders, and people who could have intervened, but did not.
The world of the nefesh is a mess. There’s no such thing as “a gute nefesh”. Instead, the expression that comes to mind is “goel nefesh,” something that oppresses the soul. Take the abuser, for example. Something oppressed his nefesh, and he in turn oppresses the nefesh of his victims. Understanding this does not bring an end to the pain. We’re stuck with that, as we are stuck, in our search for understanding, trying to figure out where they had enough judgment and self-control to make choices, and where they did not.
So for those who have suffered estrangement, in all its forms, from the ones we were meant to love, and who were meant to love us, I can say only this—forgive the nefesh, it was doomed to fail anyway. But we will find comfort if we can focus instead on the neshamah, on the way things ought to have been, the way things, in G-d’s pristine and eternal perspective, actually are. Perhaps those who came before forgot that someone is always watching. Perhaps they couldn’t remember. Perhaps they never even knew.
But we do. And with that in mind, I turn toward our future. What can we do to ensure that those, who in the future will remember us, will not have the same struggles that we may have?
David Brooks, the conservative commentator, recently wrote a book on the development of character, where he argues that people develop two resumes in the course of their lives. One is their resume for work. The other is their resume for their obituary. I would expand on his idea in several regards. First: It doesn’t have to be your job per se. It includes any resume that diverts you from the truly essential in your life, the things you really should want to be remembered for.
It could be your job resume; or your Ashley Madison/online resume, the one where all the men are 6’2”, with six pack abs and a Nobel Prize; or the resume you build up with just about everyone—your frat, the guys who root for your team, your drinking buddies, your alumni association, your Star Trek fan club—everyone, except the truly essential people in your life.
At the end of the day—or actually, in this case, at the end of your life—it won’t really matter if you know the call number of the Federation Starship Enterprise, or the number of strangers that you had some kind of trivial relationship with, or how many good jokes you shared with the boys.
What will matter is what is going to happen here in this room in the next few minutes.
What will your loved one say about you? Your husband or wife. Your children. Your parents? Your brother or sister. Your friends. They are watching you, will always be watching you not only for the rest of your life, but for the rest of their lives.
And this is my second emendation of David Brooks’ idea. Yes, you prepare your obituary resume—but you don’t get to finish it. It is completed by those you leave behind.
We are not trained to think this way. Popular culture pushes us to set our own standard, be our own person, refuse to be judged. Well, refuse all you want, but you will be judged. We all are. Inevitably. We are judged on high; we are jjudged below. Because someone is watching. It could be the Divine Someone with a capital S. Or it could be the someone who is sitting next to you right now. But trust me, you will be judged. Because no one can simply ignore the ways they’ve been hurt or abused, ignored or abandoned, betrayed or lied to, intimidated or humiliated—you can fill in the blank here yourself—not when it involves a loved one. The pain is too great, the wound is too deep. Eventually, perhaps, one can come to terms with it. But ignore it? No one has that much equanimity, not when love is in the picture.
At the end of Yizkor we recite the Kaddish. It is not a prayer about those we mourn, but rather a prayer about G-d. It is meant to lead us away from the travails of the nefesh, and to the serenity of the neshamah; it is meant to remind us that we can transcend the past and transcend the future. We can imagine a past the way it ought to have been, and know in our hearts, with absolute certainty, that the neshamah of the ones who came before us join with our neshamah in that imagining.
And we can envision a future where we become what we are meant to become, spurred forward by our memory both of what was, and of what should have been.
Ken yehi ratzon. Amen.