Morning Rosh Hashanah 5767

Rabbi Mark H. Levin, D.H.L.

 

Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to outpatients at the clinic.

One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door I
opened it to see a truly awful looking man … [t]he appalling thing was his face, lopsided from swelling, red and raw.  Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, "Good evening. I've come to see if you've a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there's no bus 'till morning."

He told me he'd been hunting for a room since noon but with no success; no
one seemed to have a room. "I guess it's my face. I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments..."

For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: "I could sleep in
this rocking chair on the porch...." I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch… 

… It didn't take a long time to see that this old man had an
oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury. He didn't tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence was prefaced with thanks to God for a blessing. He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer. He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going.

At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children's room for him. When I got up
in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded, and the little man was out
on the porch.

He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as if
asking a great favor, he said, Could I please come back and stay the next time I have a treatment? I won't put you out a bit. I can sleep fine in a chair."
He paused a moment and then added, "Your children made me feel at home.
Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don't seem to mind." I told him he was welcome to come again.

And on his next trip he arrived a little after seven in the morning. As a
gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen.
He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they'd be nice and fresh. I knew his bus left at 4 a.m., and I wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.

In the years he came to stay overnight with us there was never a time that he
did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden…

When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a comment our
next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning. "Did you keep that
awful looking man last night? I turned him away! You can lose roomers by putting up such people!"
 

I know our family always will be grateful to have known him; from him we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude to God.

Recognizing, ignoring, or assaulting our dignity can guarantee peace or war in human interactions. We need to teach ourselves and our children not to respond negatively to another person just because of appearances, as the first woman did when the fisherman came to her door, but to respond to a person's dignity. Let me explain.

What is dignity? It is self-respect combined with morality. Dignity points to the ennoblement, the highest expression of the human being; and for believers, an expression of the divine soul in human form. 

 

The 20^th century taught us how to win conflicts by removing the dignity of our opponents. It’s a permanent legacy of the Nazis. I will get to what that means in our own lives, but consider that the Nazis championed humiliation as a weapon. Survivor Reska Weiss wrote of her imprisonment in a labor camp during the freezing Polish winter: “Urine and excreta poured down the prisoners’ legs, and by nightfall the excrement, which had frozen to our limbs, gave off its stench. We were really no longer human beings in the accepted sense. Not even animals, but putrefying corpses moving on two legs.” (Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 57) In order to implement the inhuman capacity to murder innocent human beings in cold blood, the Nazis found it necessary first to humiliate, to remove all indications of their victim’s humanity. Removing inherent humanity provides a necessary step for brutal treatment. You can’t stomach persecuting a person without degrading them first.

 

Indignity wields a two-edged sword. The concentration camp guards were compelled to humiliate even the dying, to condition themselves to killing; and thus both the persecutor and persecuted were forced to abandon their personhood, like a teenager who pushes another into the water and is dragged in himself. This is an important lesson, because we learn that those who refuse to grant respect succumb also: in humiliating others we destroy our own humanity. 

 

Notice the tools the Nazis used. Sure they beat their victims, and refused them toilets and beds. But they also utilized tools we use as modern people: they replaced names with numbers and thus removed individuality; they absolutely controlled appearance: clothes, hair, all possessions, and thus they defined the personhood of their victims. 

 

The Nazis stripped Jews to their marrow, then defined that person as stench. But think about it, we use the same tools to define others as worthy or unworthy. Why else do children need to buy the right pair of $80 jeans or $120 athletic shoes? Why else the huge cars and homes? Certainly one reason is that we are purchasing dignity with our outward appearance; but then do we also look down upon those who do not measure up? 

 

On Wednesday this week an article appeared in the Kansas City Star that a girlee magazine will publish the nude pictures of mid-west coeds, and more of them come from KU than from any other university. And I am certain that many local men reading this article thought to themselves, “YES!” because we don’t condemn the demeaning of women, the removal of women’s dignity. Why else is every female I know sensitive about her weight? Because we grant dignity by how a person looks: meaning how sexually attractive she is. It’s demeaning, but it’s everywhere; and we train our girls to be sex objects with their clothing and bathing suits from the youngest ages, putting sexual attraction before dignity, and think nothing of it.

 

Such attitudes reduce all of us to considering others as objects to be exploited. Think about your motive for choosing your clothing. Why do so many people choose clothing to look sexually attractive rather than clothing to look dignified? And why we do this to our children is beyond my comprehension!

 

Fortunately indignity can be willed away, and donning the mental garments of dignity shields us from psychological harm. The Boarding House owner who turned away the fisherman with the appalling facial skin cancer was certainly no Nazi! She was only protecting her livelihood she contended, as any rational human being would do under the same circumstances. Completely understandable in a profit driven age! The Boarding House owner presumed, for she did not know for certain, that others would discriminate against the fisherman because of his ugliness; and she rationalized her cruelty by stating that renters would stay away from any Boarding House in which the fisherman found refuge.  She replaced the regard for human life with monetary profits. The Nazis murdered, the boardinghouse owner merely excluded. 

 

What would you have done? Would you have taken in the scary looking man?

 

Gordon Alport helped us understand this by listing 5 stages of prejudging people: the mildest is first, just talking about the victim, 2. passively avoiding the individual, 3. actively discriminating by excluding the victim, 4. physically attacking the victim, and 5. exterminating the victim, as the Nazis did. The Boarding House lady stood on step two: avoiding, while the Nazis stood on the top of the ladder of prejudice, rung 5: extermination. But both stood on the same ladder of discrimination that obliterates self-esteem. Whom do we avoid in our lives, and is it because of their looks?

 

Rabbi in Pirke Avot asked, “What is the proper way in which a person should walk? Anything that is an honor for the doer, and also brings honor from others.” 

 

You know, we do try to protect people’s dignity. Someone tells a man whose zipper is open that he needs to zip it up. We tell people with spinach in their teeth to go wash out their mouths. It’s not like we ignore the dignity of the people around us. But do you simply accept humiliating someone as a part of our culture?

 

A member of the congregation called me. He had a problem. A person had worked for him for years, but his work was no longer successful and the employer had to let him go. The employer wanted to know which way he should act: should he just let the employee go and wish him well; or should he tell him to find a job, keep him on for a definite period of time, and continue to pay him until he left? Just letting the employee go was most prudent from the employer’s viewpoint, but would leave the employee without an income or insurance.  The employer wanted to know: What must I do to protect this person’s dignity? 

 

The second option, giving notice and time to find another job was certainly kinder, and would maintain the employee’s self-esteem, but might be hard on the company. The man called to inquire which direction he should take. But by the conclusion of his explanation to me, the man said, “I know what I have to do; you don’t have to say anything.” He chose to maintain the employee’s self-esteem.

 

We must act in a way that brings honor in the doer’s eyes, and honor from others. So often in divorce situations men and women who had once loved one another, who raised children together, who slept in the same bed and shared their most intimate thoughts, drag each other and their children through the mudslinging of condemnation and belittlement. I will never understand, no matter what, how couples can purposefully use their own children as instruments of revenge against an offending former spouse. I don’t care how much you now feel you hate someone: maintain your dignity; maintain the dignity of your children; and also important: maintain the dignity of your former spouse. How do people cut off a woman and children from enough income to survive? I have seen men refuse to pay for a woman to maintain her home; refuse to pay for their children’s schooling or clothing; refuse to share expenses, all in retaliation for some hurt. Divorce is painful enough without purposefully compounding the pain by refusing adequate funds to live, or putting children in the position of picking one parent over another. Where is our dignity? How do we inflict pain on the very people we loved enough to marry? We wouldn’t kick a dog. We wouldn’t eviscerate a cat. How can we knife our own children by making them the agents of our dislike? “Tell your father to have you back by 5:00.” “Tell your mother I will not trade days off with her; she must adhere to the court schedule.” How humiliating for the children, not to mention the former spouse. No, we are not condemning children to sleep in their own excrement; we are forcing them to sleep in our metaphorical excrement, and insisting they then love us in return. We humiliate those we love, those we claim to love, and those we used to love. Dignity is the hallmark of the decent human being.

 

The Holocaust is the model of human depravity, but it also inspired others to rise to angelic heights. Principal among the Holocaust’s heroes were Pastor Andre Trocme and his wife Magda of Le Chambon Sur Lignon, France. Pastor Trocme organized his entire village to save Jews. They actually imported Jews in order to save their lives during the Nazi occupation of France. 

 

Trocme insisted on the dignity of every human being, and daily risked his life, his family’s lives, and the life of every person he could in Le Chambon to reach out to save every person he perceived would be killed by the Nazis as a Jew. He made the victims believe they were doing him, Trocme, a favor.  He imported Jews so that he could protect them.  He protected the dignity of each human being separately, and we should learn by his example to our people. 

 

Take Trocme seriously, because he was a Christian who did this for you and for me. Let me conclude with a simple story that each of us should take to heart: 

One of the refugees was Daniel Isaac, son of the distinguished French historian Jules Isaac. Being by definition a Jew because all four of his grandparents had been practicing Jews, he found himself living amid the growing anti-Semitism of the French people, though he was a thoroughly assimilated Frenchman and a Protestant. The radios, the newspapers, the films, and even wall posters were making Frenchmen more and more anti-Semitic in accordance with Vichy policy. One day he received a phone call from Pastor Trocme of Le Chambon. Trocme asked him to come to the village to teach philosophy to summer school classes at the Cevenol School. Isaac replied that he had no experience in teaching philosophy and had studied very little of the subject. Besides, he could not move his family so far for the sake of a temporary summer job. Trocme insisted, telling Isaac that he would be rendering the school and Le Chambon a great service if he came … 

It is certain that Andre Trocme was trying to protect him as a Jew.  It was characteristic of him, Isaac says, to help you while convincing you that you were helping him. In fact, many of the refugees who passed through Le Chambon found themselves receiving Andre Trocme’s gratitude while he was saving their lives. 

 

One Boarding House owner took the man in; another sent him away; Pastor Trocme sought out victims to save their lives. And what about us? Do we choose exclusion, inclusion, or go out of our way to help? What do we do to tear down or build up the images of God with whom we live? Do we treat other human beings as eye candy, or as souls? This week, until Yom Kippur, let us examine how we treat each and every human being, boss and employee, family and servant, friend and foe. Let us raise up those we have intimidated, befriend those we have shunned, care about the unimportant. Let us give ourselves this gift, and we will discover the richness of the human soul, both ours and the others, and begin to bring peace to our world.