Yom Kippur Sermon, 5774

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Shabbat Shalom! Gut Yontiff!

So, while we’re on the subject of Yom Kippur – let me ask you a question:

If you could do it, would you take some kind of steroids to help you become a better person?

Do you think it should be legal to take them if they could be made available?

You don’t have to answer immediately. Think about it for a minute.

Okay. Whatever your thoughts about taking these steroids to become a better person – would you take them if they could improve your professional life?

What about your social life? Your mind?
Your looks?

(Notice that I have not asked whether you have actually already taken such steroid-type supplements.)

And to move from the serious to the silly – If you could take some kind of steroids to help you improve at sports, would you?

And, finally, one last question – do you think athletes should be penalized for using steroids or other banned substances? Why should they be either prohibited or legalized?

Good. While you think about these questions and discuss them among yourselves, please excuse me while I take a break and get a cup of coffee in the kitchen to give me some energy for the rest of the service.

Oh, yeah! It’s Yom Kippur. I can’t have that coffee. Or that water, or sandwich or snack, or anything else to eat or drink. Today all food and drink has been declared a banned dietary supplement.

Does anyone want to share with us their thinking about my first question? – Would you want to take a steroid if it could make you a better person? (open up discussion to congregation; review stated viewpoints)

Here is what I have been thinking: The controversy about steroid use in sports raises some basic questions about how we think of ourselves, our identities and our “agency” – that’s a fancy term to refer to our capacity to act on our own behalf. These questions are at the root of the entire season of the Days of Awe. We are called to ask – Who are we? Are we ready to take responsibility for our actions? How well are we using our power to act, our agency?

What is the problem with steroids and the use of other chemicals and such? One issue that comes up is “unfair competition.” Athletes need to compete on a level playing field, with no one obtaining an unfair advantage. But if that were the real problem it could be solved very simply – allow everyone and anyone to take steroids, etc.

The problem is more basic than that. It touches on our most fundamental intuitions about what makes a person authentically who they are, about what a “self” really consists of. Last night I spoke about our nakedness and our garments. Sports is an area where these questions get acted out very literally. The human body is showcased, or cloaked in uniforms. Whose identity is on display?

We want to believe that sports competition “brings out the best in us.” The point is –“in us.” The exhilaration of sports is produced by human beings pushing themselves to their own limits of excellence. Besides the pure fun of playing games, competitive sports add the dimension of self-discovery. We didn’t know we had it in us. Or, watching others, we are amazed that a simple human being like you and me could run, throw, hit, or lift that way and at that moment of challenge. We are constantly amazed that we – ourselves or our surrogates – had it in us.

That’s the difference between, say, college wrestling and professional wrestling. Real wrestling is, well, real – because it really is a challenge with an unknown outcome, while the other kind of wrestling is pure entertainment. One is a test of will, strength, skill and other resources – physical, mental and, perhaps, even spiritual – called up by each individual as best as they can, while the other is a play with make-believe characters, acting out a phony drama that is a caricature of human emotion, intelligence, endurance and courage.

I join those who are acutely uncomfortable with the use of steroids and other supplements in competitive sports. I see it as a betrayal of what athletics is supposed to be about. And worse, I see it as a self-betrayal committed by people who do not seem to trust themselves, who do not believe enough in the best within themselves, who, in order to succeed, lie to themselves and make others lie for them. Because they falsely identify their success in sports with their own success as people, they view a loss in sports as a blemish on themselves. This is not true at all. Yet, tragically, it produces a self-fulfilling cycle whereby the athlete does compromise his or her inner truth in pursuit of this falsehood.

I do not believe that it is possible to create a steroid to make anyone a better person, precisely because it is only your true self that can strive to be a better person. On Yom Kippur we relinquish all physical supplements and strip ourselves down to our essence because we believe that our growth comes, not from some artificial substance, but from our striving for a life of substance.

Yom Kippur also alerts us to an important distinction that needs to be articulated. There is, to my mind, a fundamental difference between performance enhancing drugs, on the one hand, and medicine. Drugs that relieve human suffering or correct physiological imbalances and impairments are not prohibited. They allow us to be who we are, rather than become someone we are not. Yom Kippur challenges us to grapple with this concept – to dispense with the truly dispensable in order to renew our true selves.

Each of us must think this through. What is at my core? Who do I want to become in essence? What is primary to my identity and what is secondary or peripheral or irrelevant.

Every year at Rosh Ha-Shanah we read the Torah’s story of the near sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham. So many of us have a very hard time understanding what Abraham thought he was accomplishing. I have heard vocal expressions of anger and rejection of the Torah for its immoral teachings in the name of religion.

Yet everyday in our world parents sacrifice their child’s identity and wellbeing in the panicked fear that otherwise their child will not become the next Mickey Mantle. And the rest of us accept it as just another choice in our culture. As I said on Rosh Ha-Shanah, I am not ashamed that, as an 11-year old boy I idolized “The Mick.” But Mantle’s father sacrificed his son on the altar of sports excellence and I would be morally obtuse were I to ignore all that in the name of enjoying the stats and video replays.

Why does this happen? Why is steroid use becoming an epidemic in competitive sports, seeping down from the highest levels and poisoning the sports culture in schools and youth league environments? Why does it increasingly happen?

As they say, “Follow the money.” The pressure for elite athletes to engage in this deceit of the public and of themselves – that pressure is overwhelming. Where does this enormous pressure come from? It comes from us. That pressure is being applied by millions of fans who keep clamoring for more thrills, more impact, more games, everywhere and all the time. That pressure is being created by us. The big corporations are just following our lead. As they say, they are just giving the public what we want.

Why do we keep pushing? Why do we allow athletes to be cheated out of a decent education? Why do we turn a blind eye to sexual abuse, bullying, homophobia, racism and the physical destruction of human beings in the world of sports?

Is our own love of sports worth any price? Do we so desperately need these massive shows of raw power, speed and grit to supply us with vicarious fulfillment?

We are willing to pay dearly, or have others pay dearly, because we think we have an existential need for sports. Sports have become our own steroids, pumping up our sense of ourselves. Tragically, we have invested our sense of selfhood in games and spectacles. How could we live without them? And by now, through the steroids of sports, we have created a bloated, self-devouring, global industry that has a life of its own.

I am not preaching against all sports. I still enjoy watching a game every once in a while, especially with my son. As many of you know, he has devoted his young life to a serious pursuit of sports. I have yelled myself hoarse rooting for him. But what I am really rooting for him to succeed in is his attempts to find ways to use the power and magic of sports as a tool for social betterment, for restoring human dignity to the poor and disadvantaged, for inspiring them to dream of life as richer and more multi-dimensional than either their blighted neighborhoods or the noise and glitz of ESPN.

Sports is a beautiful symbolic representation, in physical form, of human excellence. We have turned it into an idol. Instead of throwing ourselves or our children on the altar of this false god, we need to appreciate it as a tool, an instrument that can instill courage and determination in us so that we will try our utmost to effect improvement and change in the world.

This year the Olympics will be hosted by Russia. Russia is a state that viciously oppresses its citizens. It encourages its citizens to live a culture of apathy and cruelty. It coldly supports and protects other dictators who are guilty of mass murder of civilians. The latest drop in the bucket of its crimes is its active persecution of gays and its criminalizing of even voicing any positive opinion about homosexuals.

Do we care?

Some people respond that, while all these things are bad, they should be kept out of our celebration of sports. Those things are politics, and sports is separate. A similar argument was used for years to divorce the Olympics from the murder of the Israeli team that came to the Olympics. Apparently one had nothing to do with the other.

Some people respond that it is not proper to do or say anything about Russia’s crimes because there are so many other countries that are also guilty of wrongs, including our own. If we protest this wrong then we will have to protest everything.

What, then, should be done? Nothing — at least not until after we enjoy watching or participating in the games. We become very moralistic and outraged over any attempt to deprive us of the chance to forget ourselves in the dream of a pure world of sports, unrelated to real life.

I believe that these arguments are incoherent. Sports cannot be both totally innocuous and insignificant and also claim our complete and utter attention and devotion. The Olympics is sports, which is also politics and business and morality all wrapped together.

Such arguments also betray a failure of faith in our ability to effect change in this world. Just because there is so much wrong all around us does not mean that nothing at all can be done to make small but real improvements here or there. We cheer on people who spend their entire days and nights, every ounce of their energy, trying to shave a millisecond off their sprinting time, and we can’t be bothered to try to save one life, one person from a beating or humiliation, one child from abuse?

Should these Olympics be boycotted? Will that help better the world, if even only in a small measure? Or, perhaps, athletes should all go – but on the condition that they agree to raise their voices in defiance of Russia’s laws, and speak out for gay rights and the human dignity of all? Or, maybe we should pressure Coca Cola and other sponsors to adopt an activist stance?

I don’t know which option is the best one or whether there are others that are better. But we cannot proceed as if we have no choices.

I do know that if we do not push ourselves to ask these questions and then, if we do not really push ourselves to come up with serious answers, then this Yom Kippur fast day will have been a hollow charade.

Let the hunger games continue.

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What do you think?