So – a shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture – when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a very expensive suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and Italian silk tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd, “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”
The shepherd looks up and down at the man, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, “Sure. Why not?”
The man parks his car, whips out his notebook computer, connects it to his cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and turns to the shepherd and says, “You have exactly 1586 sheep.”
“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep.” says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the back of his car.
Then the shepherd says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?”
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”
“You’re a consultant.” says the shepherd.
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the young man, “but how did you guess that?”
“No guessing required.” answered the shepherd. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already know; to a question I never asked; and you don’t know anything about my business ….
“ … Now give me back my dog.”
On this day of forgiveness, I hope you’ll indulge me if, as a rabbi, I can’t help but approach this joke as a text that invites commentary.
Let’s see – the joke makes fun of consultants. It pokes fun at our modern reliance on technological toys. It celebrates the no-nonsense simplicity of the shepherd, a quintessentially Biblical figure. The ultra-modern guy seeks to take something away from the shepherd even though he has no use for it and doesn’t even know what it is. The stalwart shepherd looks after all the animals under his care, finding a way to restore to the fold his faithful dog, appropriated by the mindlessly acquisitive consultant.
Wow. It sounds like there’s a sermon in there.
Maybe there is. Since I have appealed to your indulgence up to now, perhaps I can ask you to further grant me that this joke might even have a kind of “Kol Nidrei” quality to it – we say the words, but we also know that we don’t really intend to back them up. Because, of course, another, crucial element of the joke is that it is being told by and to people who have a lot more in common with our consultant type than with the shepherd guy.
This Yom Kippur a move was initiated – following a similar campaign earlier this year with regard to Shabbat – to get people to unplug themselves from all their phones, pods, berries, etc. The idea has caused a ceretain amount of uneasy anxiety among some folks. How could we manage for even a day without being connected? No, not too many of us are going to renounce our techno-saturated lives for the natural simplicity of the shepherd. The joke is a way for us to wink at that alternate reality as we get back into our cars and drive away – sans the sheep we might have wanted for a trophy – but with the Bluetooth hovering over our ear. So we get the extra enjoyment of making fun of ourselves and feeling good about it. Is the joke on us? Not if we’re telling it.
Yet, there is a glimmer of yearning in this joke that we acknowledge and then dismiss. The consultant is plugged into a global network of communications and information sharing, yet he is the one who is out of touch. Literally.
This joke speaks to our yearning for touch, for a sense of tangible reality, a reality of slow moving, textured experience. There is a whole area of popular culture dealing with living Biblically, walking the Bible, or, more generically, getting in touch with the earth, and so on. It is intriguing, but a reality-check tells us that this is a fantasy, a fringe curiosity, an experience to be visited for a short period of time – a charitable cause or an entertainment – but it is not something sustainable and integral to the lives we feel compelled to lead.
I believe that this is true to the extent that we think in the simplistic, either/or framework of our joke. We know that it is impossible to turn the clock back to that simpler time. The primal rhythms are lost to us. The rootedness of the old ways is a thing of the past. Even if we were not afraid of losing out on the latest in life, we would still not be able to retrieve that old reality, because we can’t go backwards. So we tell the joke and move on.
But what about the yearning?
For many of us it remains. It gets channeled into various outlets that we hope will grant us at least a temporary respite. For some of us, this is where the synagogue comes in.
We can ask the question from two directions – what is a synagogue for? And – what do we want out of a synagogue.
Which brings me to my next amusing anecdote. This one is actually true. It happened this week at another synagogue. As a colleague of mine, the rabbi there, relates it –
A call came in to the shul office. According to the secretary, the caller asked if they could put their kids in baby-sitting on Saturday – that’s today, Yom Kippur.
Are you members? No.
Are you coming to services with friends? No.
Would you like tickets? No, we just want to put our kids in baby-sitting.
The secretary said, “I’m sorry, we don’t offer that kind of service.”
And the response was – “Well, then I guess this isn’t the right kind of synagogue for us.”
Is Shomrei the right kind of synagogue for you?
Well, what kind of synagogue is Shomrei? What kind of shul does it strive to be?
This question has as many answers as it has members, and then some. But no shul can be all things to all people. It needs to have a core identity.
Here is one attempt by me to state Shomrei’s core identity and mission. Shomrei is a real place that strives to give a real response to the yearning I talked about before – the yearning for touch.
Our response is embodied in our devotion to two complementary values: tradition and community.
Tradition – we think of tradition as a collection of old rituals, old language and old wisdom. It looms over us with some degree of authority, like a parent, or, in cultural terms, like the classics. But the problem with thinking of tradition in that way is that such an image naturally sets up tradition for our rejection of it, just as we must, if we are to grow, extricate ourselves from under our parents’ authority.
But tradition is not this backword-pulling burden. Tradition is the ongoing, forward-driving response of a people – and Jewish tradition is the ongoing, forward-driving response of our people – to the need to satisfy our primal yearning for touch within an integrated life that takes place now, in this ever-changing world. Our tradition is the ever-changing and ever-growing model of how to be shepherd and consultant at the same time. Jewish tradition offers us the materials and practices that can enable us to enrich our lives by keeping us in touch – in touch with nature, with day-and-night’s rhythms, with our bodies and our emotions, with each other, and with God, the Horizon of the Infinite, touching our own finitude and mortality. Our tradition is about touch – about holding on to the Torah as we make a blessing, about smelling the spices after Shabbat, about creating a silence in prayer that is so thick we can feel it; it is about holding hands together as we dance before the moon.
Dancing. I mentioned last night that dance is central to Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur, from its first moments to its closing, is a day of community. But for modern individualists community may seem suffocating instead of inviting. Community seems to be more about stasis rather than about movement. Our tradition reminds us that communities dance. Dance is about expanding into space and dance is about coming close enough to touch. Ever since human beings have had the yearning for touch, dance has been essential to feeling life to the fullest and it has been central to creating a feeling of exuberant freedom while at the same time creating a feeling of bonding in community.
So it has been for our people. When Moses and the Children of Israel celebrated God’s salvation at the Red Sea, they burst into song. As I have mentioned on other occasions, the role of Miriam is just as central to the story, and should be included in our recital of the Song at the Sea.
But, not only did Miriam lead the women in the same song, they also added an important new element –
ותקח מרים הנביאה את התוף בידה
ותצאנה כל הנשים אחריה
בתופים ובמחולות
Then Miriam the Prophetess took the timbrel in her hand
and all the women went out following her
with timbrels – and dances
This was the moment of our first national expression, our first coming together as a people – in song and in dance.
It is precisely because Shomrei Emunah is a traditional community that it is always breathing and renewing itself without losing touch with the primal truths we yearn for. Let me mention just one example.
This year we changed the configuration of the seating in the sanctuary. Why? I think it is important to understand that this was not an aesthetic move concerned with exchanging wooden pews for plush seats. It was not about change for the sake of change or for the sake of being more up-to-date. The goal was to create an open, flexible space that would overcome the tendency of the previous setup to create a distance between the congregation and whatever was happening in the room – the service, ceremony or program that was, after all, the very reason that the congregation was sitting there. The space was opened and the seats were turned into a semi-cirular arc that gently encourages those seated there to feel closer to the proceedings and closer to each other. We did not mean to exchange wooden pews for cushioned chairs. We meant to exchange distance for touch.
It was, and continues to be – for this is an ongoing project – about changing the feeling of the space in which we congregate, pray and study…
and dance.
And dance!
Because, I will let you in on a guilty secret. Once, this year, not that long ago, maybe a couple of months back, we danced on a Friday night. We held hands and danced to welcome the Shabbat bride. We were a little shocked by ourselves, but we allowed ourselves to reach out, to enter the open space and circle together. We broke free, at the same time that we held each others hands.
I wonder when we will dance like that again. When will we again feel free enough to celebrate our mutual presence? I hope we will.
The Yizkor prayers are about to begin. It is not a time of dancing, but it is a time of touching. We reach out to touch those no longer physically among us. As our hearts beat and our throats tighten, we can feel them among us. And, as I have done in the past, I ask that, even if you do not personally have a loved one to say a prayer for, that you stay, that everyone stay together for these moments. If this is the time when we invite those who can no longer be with us, physically, to come and join us in our prayers, then this is certainly also the time when we, who can be present, should be here – to touch and be touched by our lives, our memories and our yearnings. Shanah Tovah.
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