Rosh HaShanah

THE LONELINESS OF BETRAYAL

Last night, I shared a story about when I was in India in 2013 and there was one of the first social media blow ups about Israel and Gaza, and I lost about 20 friends I thought were good friends in the span of two weeks. What I didn’t share was how it hit me in the moment and this morning, I want to start there.

I had been in India for a few months, all by myself, and was really enjoying it.  I was loving having alone time.  Well, it wasn’t exactly alone time.  It was India.  I went to the Maha Kumbha Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage that happens every 144 years, the largest gathering of humans on the planet.   I was also teaching online and enjoying my connection with students and I was getting to know Varanasi the way I know Jerusalem. 

Then the unfriending began and kept going and then silence. At first I was just enraged and spinning, but when the anger would subside, I felt so heavy and disoriented.  The Social silence was deafening. I remember SKYPING with Tim, (remember SKYPE with that irritating ring?) and telling him how angry and hurt I was, and then all of a sudden I just started balling.  Balling like you can’t breathe balling.  Tim was asking “what’s wrong” and finally it came out:   I’m just so lonely.

It wasn’t being in India. It was the loneliness of betrayal.

I think so many of us are carrying the loneliness of betrayal and the weight and sadness of it makes our bones ache.  Then it can make our hearts calloused.  

It comes in many forms and from many directions.   

Perhaps for you,  it’s the betrayal of aging. 

Perhaps it’s the betrayal of your body. 

Or perhaps it the betrayal of our national politics, our Supreme Court overturning Roe V Wade.  

Or perhaps it is the betrayal of the economy or climate change.

Or perhaps it is the betrayal of friends who turn out to be antisemites. 

Or perhaps it is much more intimate: your children.  Or your spouse. 

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This loneliness of betrayal fills our Torah readings today.   Here we have this unlikely and imperfect family:  Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael and finally Isaac, imperfect, but holding together across cultures in this new land they had settled in.   Things looked good.  They had money.  Finally, Sarah had a child of her own.  Ishmael was a skilled hunter so they ate well.  The boys were friends, and they had reason to look forward to the future.

Then, it seems, one thing happened that blew the family apart. One day, Sarah saw Ishmael playing inappropriately with Isaac, and nothing in the family would ever be the same.  She demanded Abraham kick out Hagar, and his son Ishmael.  Abraham rather than arguing, acquiesces and expels them.   Then Abraham, perhaps in grief, perhaps in guilt, hears God telling him to kill Isaac and rather than arguing, Abraham, follows this calling. 

God stops him, but the damage is done.  Sarah dies in the wake of this family rupture.  She is alone in their home in Hebron.  Abraham is far away in Beer Sheva, Hagar and Ishmael are across the Jordan.  We don’t know where Isaac fled to after his father tried to kill him. 

After the promising call of Lech L’cha, to leave home and head to a promised land and become a nation, our readings find that promise utterly betrayed, and the family traumatized, scattered, confused, and alone.  Something unexpected happens, everyone reacts in different ways and the family unravels.     

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So many of us can see ourselves or see someone we know in this unravelling.

I think perhaps all of us can find ourselves in this sense of dissolution, this loneliness because I am finding in our culture today a growing and pervasive sense of loneliness and betrayal. We see it’s dark shadow in our politics. Like Sarah’s family, we find ourselves having been through upheaval to find ourselves separated.

There have been many important books on loneliness in America:  Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together,  and in 2018, Johann Harri published Lost Connections that argued that much of the epidemic of depression and substance use in our society is caused by loneliness.   

Harri cited research that shows that 41% of Americans are lonely.  Other surveys find that number to be much higher.  Recent surveys shows that during the pandemic, this number rose precipitously, and isn’t yet going back down

As Harri argues and I agree, among the things we have been betrayed by are our own desires.  Whether you call it consumerism, individualism, capitalism, hedonism, or just freedom, we are being taught that doing just what we want will make us happy.  We are being undone by the siren song of self.  

We live in a culture that preaches that the way to happiness is by finding our authentic selves, by following our truth, by learning to be most ourselves, and of course that is part of the truth.  Judaism also teaches that the individual is of immense significance.  Every life is an entire world. Each one of us, though we are all in God’s image, is different, therefore unique and irreplaceable.  If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

Yet the first time the words “not good” appear in the Torah are in the verse, “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18).

In the Bible, the expression “every one did as they pleased” signifies a failed society. It has become the American version of “The Good” and I fear the abiding loneliness that comes with this good.    When I am only for myself, what am I?

Judaism challenges us to be individuals who are also in community. Judaism holds us responsible for creating a society that functions for its most vulnerable.  That is the work of being human because we are a species that survives and thrives by our ability to cooperate with others that annoy us. 

Community is infuriating and people will drive you crazy.  People will let you down, not appreciate you, turn on you.  They will encourage you to become a leader and then attack you for being a leader.  Working in large groups tends to make you hate the very people you are supposed to be creating community with.  People, my friends, are not easy.  Isn’t that really what all the stories in the Torah make painfully clear?  They get out of slavery and they start fighting and tearing the society apart.  They get the Torah and it starts again.  They get to the border of the promised land and there it is – throwing rocks at Moses and begging to go back to Egypt.  People are hard.  And it may surprise you to hear that Jews are not easier. 

It is so easy to retreat into our homes and our screens, to put our feet up and watch Netflix.  It is so comfortable.  But Comfortable is very different than happy or fulfilled.

Building community takes energy it often feels we don’t have, but the paradox is that connections we make working on something meaningful together are what actually gives us more energy, makes us less anxious, and counterintuitively, creates a sense of meaning and satisfaction in our lives.    

And these days, it is become clear that particularly as Jews, we need each other.  We feel the rise of anti-Semitism here at home, and in Europe.  The Jewish in the woods, “I’m a citizen of the world,” universalist bubble we have grown up in is again proving itself quite fragile.  I don’t want us to be Jewish out of fear; there are so many joyful profound philosophical reasons to embrace Jewish tradition and thought, but those joys and insights only come from practicing Judaism together, with others in community.   It is one of the key insights of Judaism.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l, put it this way,  “much of Judaism is about the shape and structure of our togetherness. It values the individual but does not endorse individualism.  Ours is a religion of community. Our holiest prayers can only be said in the presence of a minyan, the minimum definition of a community. When we pray, we do so as a community.”

One key example of this is the High Holy Days.  We don’t just repent for what we’ve done, but we repent in community for what we have done – or not done- collectively

What interested me most in Johann Harri’s book Lost Connections was an interview he did with neuroscientist John Cacioppo.  Cacioppo’s research led him to observe

“that to end loneliness, you need other people – plus something else.  You also need to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you.  Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people; it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else.   To end loneliness, you need to have a sense of mutual aid and protection.” Lost Connections. Johann Hari p.83

 Isn’t that what a synagogue is? What a synagogue does?   Here, despite our individual differences, we share something that matters, a religious tradition that matters, a culture and a history that matters, a peoplehood that matters.  A Reform synagogue is a place to come together as individuals with different beliefs and choices, but knowing we are in it together, we share a strong connection to being Jewish but also healthy intellectual skepticism about our tradition, and that we will come to one another’s mutual aid and protection, particularly in the face of antisemitism.  This is how our people have survived. Something deep in our epigenetics knows this.

The path out of Egypt led through the wilderness. 

The path out of loneliness leads through community. 

The Hebrew word for repentance is t’shuvah. It literally means to return to the right path.   T’shuvah is the heart of the High Holy Days.  It’s why we are here.

So let’s return from our pandemic bubbles, from our social distance, and turn back to the path of community.

This community of Temple Sinai needs you.  We have grown a great deal in a short time, but if we don’t do the difficult work of connecting, it won’t be sustained.  Stacie, Aimee, Mark, Saragail, David and I as staff are doing everything we can manage to facilitate that, but we need your help.   Maybe it is something like joining a committee, or starting an initiative, like the Climate Refugee group, or play groups for toddlers, or teens starting a chapter of BBYO.   Or maybe it something so much more simple:  invite people over to your home for Shabbat dinner, or lunch, or go see a movie together.   Long time members can invite new members.  School parents can invite new parents.  Queer members can create an LGBT brunch from time to time.   The form doesn’t much matter.  What matters is reaching out and making real connections.  

This year, the t’shuvah we must navigate is the return to community.   Instead of socially distancing, we must try and hold one another closer.  And then, when we reach out to the unaffiliated, we can invite them not to Temple, not to services, not to this lecture or that program, but we can invite them into community.  Nothing I can do or the synagogue can do can substitute for that sacred, lasting, personal, difficult but meaningful work.

Ken Y’hi Ratzon