No Eggs: Kol Nidre Sermon 5778

no eggsEditor’s Note: Rabbi Greenstein gave this sermon at the Kol Nidre Service 5778 (Sept 2017).

A rabbi walks into an egg store.
He walks up to the counter and says, “I’ll have a dozen fresh eggs, please.”
The man at the counter doesn’t even look up: “Sorry. No eggs.”
“Whaddaya mean?” asks the rabbi.
The man, still not looking up at the rabbi:
“Hasn’t been a fresh egg laid in these parts for three days now.”
Rabbi: “Is that so? Why, just yesterday, after I gave my sermon, the President came over to me and said, ‘This time, Rabbi, you really laid an egg.”

This funny joke comes from a funny story told in the Talmud:

They say that long ago, when the Jewish people were returning to their homeland and beginning to build a new Temple and start a new Jewish state, they began to worry.

“How can we make sure that the same thing won’t happen to this temple that happened to the first temple? Our Evil Inclination led us to worship false gods, neglect our responsibilities, betray our values, reject God and bring ruin to our temple and our people. How can we be sure that we won’t fall into the trap of our Evil Impulse again and repeat the same disaster? How can we rebuild our temple and our lives if we are bound to fail again?”

So they put their heads and hearts together. And they decided to pray and fast and they petitioned God: “Compassionate One! Have mercy upon us. You endowed us with an Evil Impulse. But surely it was not to wreak havoc upon us!

You meant for us to overcome our Evil Inclination and earn Your loving approval for doing so. But we cannot endure this challenge. We beg of You – we are happy to relinquish all rewards and honors we might gain from overcoming our Evil Inclination.

Just please remove it from us altogether! We are willing to live without the rewards if You will help us to live without the struggle.”

And a note dropped from Heaven: “Fine, if that’s what you wish.” And it was sealed with the seal of the Holy Blessed One: ‘Emet’ – Truth.

At that moment a fiery young lion sprang forth from the Holy of Holies that they had constructed for their new temple. “There it is!” cried a prophet. “That’s the Evil Impulse! Grab it!”

So they grabbed the fiery beast and wrestled it to the ground. The outraged roars of the lion were fearsome, shaking them to their very souls. “Quick! Throw it into this leaden case and close the lid!” And they managed to stuff the roaring fire into the container just in the nick of time.

The muffled cries of the Evil Inclination subsided. But then they heard its voice speaking in measured tones: “Know that if you do away with me the entire world will become a vast wasteland of desolation.”

Taken aback, they decided to hold off and ponder the situation for three days – – which brings us to our opening joke. During those three days that the Evil Inclination was imprisoned, they say, not a single egg was laid in all the land. (BTYoma 69b)

No Evil Impulse – no laying eggs. No cracking jokes. For three days no houses were built. No trees were planted. No couples were engaged. The stock market came to a standstill. The world was becoming a desolate place. (Gen. Rabbah 9:7)

What could they do?

So they freed the Evil Inclination from imprisonment. But we all know how hard it is to get a steady job after getting out of prison. The yetzer ha-ra  was forced to take any manner of work that might come its way.

Thus, says the Talmud, the Evil Impulse was hobbled and weakened and was never quite the same.

This sounds like a simple fairy tale, yet it gives artful expression to some challenging ideas. It seems like a superficial story, but it is not concerned with the obvious. It is not about the easy stuff, but about what is under the surface and difficult to grasp.

First – our story says that our world, despite its complexities and problems, is a world that moves toward improvement. In the words of Theodore Parker, made famous by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

This view was recently explicated by a professor at Harvard University, Steven Pinker, in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. With research and statistics to prove it, he claims that the Evil Inclination has actually lessened over time. We were once more barbaric, more cruel, more thoughtless in the way we acted toward ourselves and to others.

Similarly, our story says that during the First Temple times the Evil Inclination was untrammeled, with human evil bringing death to countless innocent people, misery to millions, destruction to our most precious treasures.  Nevertheless, claims our story, if we did not eliminate the Evil Impulse completely, we have at least made some progress.

Throughout modern times– and certainly in this amazing country of ours, the United States of America – many have embraced this progressive view of human history, of human civilization inexorably developing and improving over time.

But can this view still be held?

Is it not true, against the naïve thesis of our story, that the Evil Inclination is growing stronger and stronger before our very eyes? Isn’t it true that we were fooled by the fantasy of progress? Isn’t it true that both the perpetrators of evil and their victims, alike, are suffused with a hardened vow – to never be guilty of naivete again?

For, in a brutal world where survival is the one and urgent goal, naivete has become the most shameful of sins. One greets accusations of cruelty with defiant contempt; but to be accused of naivete is to be humiliated. And so, because we will not let ourselves be fooled, each of us holds fast to our own pain as the only real pain, as we are determined and convinced that the pain of the other person is fake, presented to fool us.

Against this spirit, our story resists despair and cynicism and insists that hope is warranted. It insists that it is a Divine truth – emet – that if  – and only if – we are willing to grapple with the Evil Impulse (- and doing so with a little whimsy can help!) – we can make progress in reducing evil and increasing the good.

Naive? Let’s remember that this fairy tale was told by rabbis who had witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple and the decimation of the Jewish people. And tomorrow we will recall how some of these rabbis suffered and gave their lives for the sake of the Torah.

They were many things, but they were not naïve. How could they imagine that anything had gotten better? Yet, they chose to believe that this was so, that there had been some slight forward movement, some mitigation of our involvement in evil.

They could believe and continue to hope because they were convinced that the way of life they were preserving and inventing contained the weapons we need to fight the Evil Impulse, the wisdom to understand that Impulse, and the tools we need to harness that yetzer ha-ra for blessing.

“Yeah, but what’s with the eggs?” you say.

This is our story’s second point – The Rabbis went on a three-day egg hunt so that we might come to realize all the good hiding in the Evil Inclination. They knew that the yetzer is found, not only in our war zones, or our secret trysting havens or hovels, or in our high powered conference rooms, or in the “Comments” sections of the web. If you should wish to get an unencumbered view of the Evil Impulse in action, get thee to a chicken coop.

No Evil Impulse, no eggs. No desire. No initiative. No building, no planting, no coupling, no life – No eggs.

The yetzer ha-ra  is the very same yetzer that gets us out of bed in the morning, that makes us prepare breakfast for the kids, makes us look for a job, or plan a vacation, that has us call a friend we have not spoken to in a long time.

The yetzer ha-ra is the very energy that makes for life.

It is none other than the elan vital – the life force, itself.

Because they wanted there to be fresh eggs every day, the Rabbis understood that we must not only fight the yetzer ha-ra. That is, indeed, a basic truth. But they called for something much harder: not only must we fight the yetzer ha-ra, we must also liberate it.

But, how can we think of freeing the “Evil Impulse”? Here’s how: On S’lihot night we heard a former neo-Nazi skinhead explain how he got recruited into that quintessentially evil group. He ruefully recalled: “I was searching for meaning in my life. I wanted to change the world.” That was his most basic motivation, his deepest drive. How wonderful! We all should have such aspirations!

So how did this man’s exemplary inner impulse – his yetzer – become a force of hatred and paranoia? Everything and everyone has an inner drive to live, a yetzer. This is no less true for Evil, itself. Evil wishes to live. Evil wishes to thrive. The yetzer  ha-ra –  is not “the evil impulse.” It is “the impulse of Evil, Evil’s own inner desire to live.”

It turns out that both I and Evil have a lot in common. We both want to live. We both want a life with purpose. We both have a yetzer.

It is out of that commonality that this former neo-Nazi , Christian Picciolini, and other members of their organization, “Life after Hate,” exhort all of us to relate to each individual who is active in the neo-Nazi community, not with violence or hatred, but with compassion and empathy. So that the inner drive for a true life will not be kidnapped by Evil, but will be freed into goodness.

One of the members of this group of former neo-Nazis, Frank Meeink, told a story that I found deeply moving. It happened at a time when he was still quite confirmed in his hatred for all Jews. But, as his bad luck would have it, just when he desperately needed a job, he was offered one by a Jew. The Jew knew that he was a neo-Nazi. The tattoos all over him made it impossible to keep it a secret. But this Jewish man said to Frank, “I don’t care what you believe, as long as you work hard and are honest.”

Frank admits that, because he “knew” that Jews were cheats and liars and stingy, he was not sure he would ever get paid for his work, but he was too desperate to turn down the job. To his amazement, his Jewish boss paid him on time, and fairly, and gave him a bonus for being such a hard worker. He continued working there. And his boss became a support and mentor as Frank worked through his distorted life.

How many of us would offer a job to a neo-Nazi (- or to a talented and opinionated quarterback, for that matter)? How many of us would recognize the bonds of humanity that we share? How many of us are willing to admit that we, too, are susceptible to the yetzer ha-ra –  the inner drive of Evil to live-on?

To engage in such empathy requires enormous expenditures of emotional and spiritual energy. How much easier it is for us to choose the path of resentment, fear and condemnation of others. To oppose and to fight evil is so necessary, but to go that route of resentment and fear is not opposition. It is to replicate the path of the very people we condemn.

This brings us to another striking image from this comic, absurd fable. It is not that unusual to portray the Evil Impulse as a fiery lion. But look at where the lion springs out from: No, not just from the chicken coop, but from the Holy of Holies of the Temple, the very spot that the heroes of our story were seeking to protect from that yetzer! Too late! It was there all the time. The Evil Impulse inhabits our most sacred places, lurking in our most sacred rituals, even, perhaps, as we assert our fiery devotion to fighting that Impulse!

But wait! Is the point of this story to sow confusion and self-contradiction? How can we hope to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice if we cannot tell the difference between the Good and the Evil Impulse? How can we differentiate between the yetzer ha-ra – the vivid desire for life of Evil itself – and the yetzer ha-tov – the desire for life that belongs to the Good?

I suggest that the difference is in what we think our inner drive for life requires. The yetzer ha-tov – the desire-for-life of the Good – wishes for an increase of life for all. More houses built, more trees planted, more love shared – more eggs. But Evil believes that, in order to satisfy its own inner drive for life, the life of others must be stunted or even extinguished. Evil believes that life is a zero-sum game. If I want some, then there will have to be less for you; if you have some, this threatens my own life.

But the essence of the life force is that it multiplies life. The more yetzer, the more eggs.

On this last of the Ten Days of Repentance, how dearly does the Evil Inclination seek to get us to sink into despair and to doubt our own potential to bring change! Or, for some of us, to arouse our fears of other human beings and doubt their moral capacities while we ratify our desire for moral self-congratulation! And how dearly does the Evil Impulse wish for us to believe that we can run away from it, into this safe and sacred space, our Holy of Holies!

After they liberated the Evil Impulse, not without hobbling it a bit, the rabbi went back to the egg store. “A dozen eggs, please.” “Sure. What are you gonna do with them?”

“Well, I’m making an omelette for the missus tonight. And you know, you can’t make an omelette without cracking some eggs.”

Gut yontif!

Rabbi Greenstein

 

Image:  “Empty egg carton” by Tom Hentoff is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Latest posts by Rabbi David Greenstein (see all)

What do you think?