“The Power of Personal Connections”

Rosh Hashanah 5768/2007
Rabbi Judith Schindler

I recently heard about a rabbi who came across a Jew who had just moved to his town. The rabbi immediately invited him to his synagogue. The prospective congregant declined the invitation: “I am sure your synagogue is great, but I do not believe in organized religion.” To which the rabbi responded, “Then you’ll love our synagogue, it is completely disorganized.”

Tonight, on Kol Nidre, we do not need to convince anyone of the power of personally connecting to their congregation. At this moment, Jews all over the world are gathering to be with one another. It is the one time of year that tickets to Temple are a hot commodity.

We can see the power of personal connections in the hundreds of congregants who have come here tonight, and we can hear the power of personal connections in the serious words spoken in the past year by members of Beth El.

“I needed you when I was sick,” our members have said, “I needed you to be with me when I was in pain, to hold my hand, to give me hope.”

“I needed you when I was grieving,” others have said, “to understand my loss, to help me encounter the emptiness.”

“I needed you when I was celebrating to make my milestone moment complete. My joy was greater because you shared it with me.”

“I needed you when I lost my job to support me. I needed you to reaffirm that I was still the person you thought I was before I was let go.”

“I needed you when I was dying, to brighten my days with your smile, to keep life within me with your touch.”

As Jews, we need one another: to mourn, to heal, to celebrate. We need one another to live, and we need one another as we die.

In this information age, when we become agitated when our cell phones lose coverage or when our internet gets disconnected, we can be seduced into believing that technology enables us to truly connect with others. But it does not.

If we rely on technology to connect with those who are most important to us: if we email our friends and family rather than talking with them in person and if rely on others to be in synagogue and build up our community rather than being here ourselves, then the day might come, when we will find ourselves in need of others and they may not be there.

We clearly have entered a technological age. The current generation of teens and young adults is known as “generation next” because of the fast paced technological changes they have witnessed and as “generation text” because of their obsession with their cell phones. According to Urban Dictionary, “They prefer texting over talking, or even personally interacting with friends. You can see them typing on their keypads everywhere: at work, at school, even while driving.”

Being technologically connected does have a positive side. We have instant access to worldwide news -- to expert knowledge in almost every field. We can participate in High Holiday services from hospital rooms and dorm rooms -- as many of you are right now. And instantaneously, we can communicate with our politicians, with our teachers, with our clergy at any time of day.

Yet on the negative side, everyone has access to us: salespeople and schemers, criminals who seek to steal our identities or our children’s innocence. Lashon hara, gossip, becomes even more insidious, as with the simple touch of a button, rumors can race around the world. And our mistakes are magnified. Our words live on in cyberspace long after we write them.

I recently read of an office blunder in which a business manager accidentally sent details of all his employees’ salaries on a company group email. Realizing his error, he set off the fire alarm to clear the office before going round and deleting the email from every “in” box.

Yet of all the negatives, the greatest danger of the technology with which we are blessed is the threat it poses to our personal relationships. When we are connected through technology, we are not truly connected. We don’t see a face, hear a voice, feel the touch of a hand or warmth of a hug. Counter to what society tells us, relationships are built and community is maintained not through email and the internet, but through what we call in Hebrew, “panim el panim – face to face” connections.

First and foremost, the power of personal connections helps us to heal.

Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, tells the story of a woman named Celia, who was a year into a relationship with a wonderful man named Richard when she felt a cancerous lump in her body. After going to the doctor she learned it was malignant. Her first thought was to her fiancé Richard who had lost his wife to cancer two years before. To protect him, she abruptly broke off their relationship.

After his continued pursuit, she finally agreed to meet with him. He asked why she had broken off their engagement. In tears, she told him about the lump she had found, about the surgery she had undergone, about the chemo she had begun. “You and the children have lived through this once already,” She said. “I won’t put you through it again.”

“You have cancer?” He asked. She nodded, tears running down her cheeks. “Oh, Celia,” he said, starting to laugh with relief. “We can do cancer… we know how to do cancer. I thought that you didn’t love me.”

With powerful personal connections, with love, we have the strength to fight any of the battles that life throws us. Science teaches that human relationships are the best remedy for all of life’s ills. Dr. Dean Ornish, author of the book Love and Survival writes that “There is no other more powerful factor in medicine – not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery – that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness, and premature death from all causes than interpersonal connection."

Here is the sad reality of the technological world in which we live. We can be in touch with many more people: we can have face books friends and email contacts in abundance. Yet still we can be alone.

As Moses, Abraham, and Isaiah all responded to God’s call by saying, “Hineini – here I am,” we need to do the same. We sustain our friendships and our family relationships by being there in person for others and by asking them to be there for us.

In Medieval Hebrew Literature, there is a tale about a king who was trying to impress a woman. He says to her: “Do you know how rich I am?”

She was not impressed.

He tries again. “Do you know how many servants I have and how many people in the world envy me?”

She still was not impressed.

Yet when he admits his weakness and his pain, and the struggles he is having with the difficult decisions he needs to make, she reaches out her hand to him in friendship.

In a Charlie Brown cartoon, Lucy remarks: “I have examined my life and found it to be perfect. So I am going to hold a ceremony and present myself with a medal. Then I will give a brilliant acceptance speech, after which I will greet myself in the receiving line and serve myself refreshments.” Then, wistfully she adds, “When you are perfect, you have to do everything yourself – and that is not fun.”

None of us is perfect. We all like to think that we are independent human beings, but we are not, we are interdependent. We need one another.

I learned that lesson this past February when I had minor surgery on my foot. Given my reaction to both the pain and pain medication, I got to see my house from a new perspective as I was most comfortable on the cold floor. I had told others I didn’t need help, but I did. Fortunately, my friends simply showed up, made meals, picked up my kids, and most of all, socialized with me as I sat nauseous with an ice pack on my foot and with a bucket in my hand.

Our lives are like a garden in which each plant is dependent on the next. The beauty of what we create will depend on the ways in which we lovingly nurture and attentively tend to the roots and to the relationships that we have.

Rabbi Harold Kushner was sitting on the beach one summer day, watching two children who were friends playing in the sand. They worked hard building a castle, with gates, towers and moats. Just when they had finished the project, a huge wave came and knocked it down. Rabbi Kushner fully expected them to break into tears, but they did not. Instead, they ran up the shore, laughing and holding hands as they sat down to build another castle.

Kushner concludes: All the things in our lives, all the complicated structures we spend so much time and energy building, are built on sand. Only our relationships to people endure. Sooner or later the wave will come and knock down what we have worked so hard to build up. When this happens, only the person who has somebody’s hand to hold will be able to laugh,”

Let us not let go of the hands that can one day sustain us by allowing our housework, homework, paid work, or paper work to overtake our lives. Let us take time everyday to do our life work of being there for our family and friends.

My latest email from Geni.com that facilitates the work of geneology informed me that I have 1,685 relatives on my family tree. Yet what good is knowing that, without knowing them.

Lastly, we need the power of personal connections to sustain our faith and our community.

In his book entitled Bowling Alone the sociologist Robert Putnam recognizes the steady decline in social interactions of every kind over the past thirty years: clubs, civic and religious involvement, friends entertaining friends in their homes, even knitting groups. We are so busy, so consumed by technology, that we don’t want to commit our time, to spending time with others.

Through his work, Putnam notes an unusual fact: over the decades there has been a steady increase of those who are engaged in the sport of bowling. Yet at the same there has been a sharp decrease in those who belong to bowling leagues. More people are bowling, yet more are bowling alone.

Here’s the reality, while you can bowl alone, you cannot be Jewish alone. Judaism requires community. We pray in community. We mourn and we celebrate in community. Today we offer our confessions not in the singular, but in the plural, taking responsibility for the wrongs of our neighbor. We eat in community, especially at Temple Beth El. And as the prominent theologian Martin Buber notes, we even find God in community – in the nexus between one human being and the next.

It is the power of the I-Thou relationship articulated by Buber, that moment of true connection when our own boundaries become blurred as we feel for another, that enables us to survive.

The tale is told of a small Jewish village in Poland. The whole community had only one rabbi and the rabbi had only one son. And that son was going to be married.

In order to make the wedding a true celebration, the mayor had a huge barrel built in the middle of the town. In the coming weeks, every member of the community was to bring a pitcher with the best wine they had.

For all you wine aficionados, I know this sounds offensive.

Over the next two weeks every villager brought his wine. The day of the wedding arrived. The couple said their vows. The groom broke the glass. The people danced. The time came for the mayor, with a mug in hand, to tap the barrel. The entire village fell silent. The liquid that poured forth was nothing but water.

For two weeks every villager had thought that he or she could get away with bringing a pitcher of water because, after all, what would one jug of water matter with all that wonderful sweet wine? Each villager expected the other villagers to do their part, figuring they had to do nothing.

The wine that is needed to lift and sustain our Jewish community is simply your presence. Listen to the voices of our congregants as they call out to you: I need you to hold my hand. I need you to wipe my tears. I need you to dance with me. I need you to value me as a single and invite me out, just as you did when I part of a couple. I need you to rejoice with me my triumphs and to help through me in my trials. I need you to give me strength when I am too tired to find the strength within myself.

And we need you, as a community, to sustain our vibrant Temple so that our children will know that the Jewish community (organized or disorganized) will be there for them -to lift their lives -- in good times, in bad times, in all times.

The Thursday prior to the holidays I got my hammer and did something I have never done. I began to build a home for Habitat for Humanity. It was hard work. But more than building a house for a beautiful family to make a home, with forty other clergy I gathered to hammer, to nail, to talk theology, to build relationships and to build a better future.

Even the strong interfaith relationships we have as a congregation and of which we are so proud, require face to face connections, not only among clergy but among our respective communities.

Technology is awesome. Just a decade ago, we could never have dreamt of the world we have today. And we cannot begin to imagine what the world will look like in a decade hence.

Our computers can do many amazing things, but our computers cannot build a house. Our computers cannot build community. Our computers cannot build relationships and heal our souls and our world. Only we can do that – face to face – with those who matter most.