I have a difficult question to ask you today.
Have you ever considered what it would be like to read your own obituary?
That is, in effect, what this day is about. Perhaps not quite as stark as all that, but in truth, it is the day when we ask ourselves, "once I leave this world, how will I be remembered?" Or -- as Rabbi Larry Kushner put it, Yom Kippur is "the day we face the worst truth about ourselves -- and from that, we are reborn."
And the truth is, if it was not for the fact that we can be reborn, it would be impossible to go through the introspection and self examination in which we need to engage in so fearlessly this day.
Perhaps you are familiar with the story of Alfred Nobel, who in fact had the opportunity to read his own obituary. Nobel, you may recall, had made his name and his fortune as the inventor of dynamite, which was employed not only for construction projects but for military applications. His brother died, and the newspaper mistakenly ran his obituary, instead of his brother's. Nobel got to see how he would be remembered. One French newspaper ran the headline, "The merchant of death is dead". He would be remembered not as a chemist and inventor, but as the one who enabled armies to reach new heights and efficiencies of damage and devastation.
That experience changed Nobel's life. Shortly after this incident, upon realizing that this is how he would be remembered, that it was this to which his life added up, he was prompted to take his fortune and direct it toward a very different end. He would use his resources and means to enhance and support the upbuilding of our world; he would work towards that which would benefit, and not decimate, humanity. Wanting to be remembered for something far more virtuous and valuable, he established the Nobel Prize -- which, of course, is for what he is best remembered today.
By common standards, Nobel would have been characterized as most successful when he was working against life. It took facing his own death to recognize that by his own standards, his life had not been a success at all.
The definition of success in our society is often cast in terms of material wealth, perhaps because it is the easiest kind to assess - the higher the numbers, the greater the success. I recall a conversation that I overheard some years ago between an adult man in his 40's and a former teacher of his. They had not seen in each other in decades. His teacher, a woman about twenty years older than him, was asking him about his schoolmates, and what he knew of them.
One man's name came up, who had gone into business. The teacher asked if he had been successful. "So successful", he replied, and went on to talk about how much money the man had made and how luxuriously he lived, all of which, it was clear from the conversation he knew from afar. He had apparently not actually seen the man in many years, and all that he knew about the man was what he had already reported. He made no reference to any other aspect of the man's life. Was he a good father? A loving husband? Was he involved in the community? Did he respond to the needs of others? How did he treat the people who worked for him? Did his business do anything to help people, bring added value to their lives in any way, or did it just take their money? Without knowing any of those things, how can we begin to know whether or not he was successful?
Thankfully, not everyone equates material wealth with success. But we can substitute academic achievement or recognition or accomplishment within in any field of endeavor for financial success, and still come up with the same equation. Being known and respected for our work is a good thing. Every one of us has every right to be proud of what we have accomplished, whether it is a scientific breakthrough, the establishment of a substantial company or a successful bake sale. Depending upon the community, those can be even more valuable forms of currency. But in the light of Yom Kippur, in the light of our own mortality, we face an inescapable truth: however we spend our lives -- as captains of industry, as teachers and scholars, as therapists or software engineers or as stay at home moms and dads - what we accomplish in life pales in comparison to how we accomplish it.
Nobel's example is a particularly dramatic one, but we all know people who have resolved to change the course of their lives, and to revise their priorities following a brush with their own mortality -- real or perceived. Recovery from a serious illness, test results that, thank God, indicate something less serious than originally feared, or the unexpected death of someone similarly situated to us often inspires self examination. Sometimes the reshuffling is more lasting, often more fleeting. In all cases, it seems that we are most likely to focus on our ultimate goals only when confronted with our own mortality.
And so we read from the Torah on this day about facing ultimate choices. The most famous words in the Torah portion we shared a few minutes ago are: "I call heaven and earth as witness this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live."
Some have responded to this text by asking what else God could possibly tell us -- choose death and die? Obviously, the Torah is saying something here about free will and responsibility. But it is saying more than that. A few verses earlier, different wording is used: Life and good, death and evil. Most of the time, we read the verse as parallelisms: life and good versus death and evil. But what if we read the text as a choice amongst four different possible responses? What if the Torah is saying to us, "choose one of the four -- life, good, death, or evil?" What if the Torah is telling us that choosing good and choosing life are not necessarily one and the same?
Why, then, does the passage conclude with "choose life" instead of "choose good"? Because except in those rarest of moments when we knowingly do something that is plain wrong, human beings believe that what we are doing at any given moment is good. What we do not always think about is whether or not it is really consonant with what any of us would say are our priorities.
While his name may or may not be familiar to you, Thomas Carlyle was one of the greatest writers of the Nineteenth Century. Benjamin Jowett, perhaps the most respected figure in English letters of his time, wrote of Carlyle that "no English writer has done more to elevate and purify our ideas of life and to make us conscious that the things of the spirit are real, and that in the last resort there is no other reality." Quite extraordinary praise. And it tells us a lot about Carlyle's values.
But there is more to Carlyle's story. In 1826, he married Jane Welsh, a woman of considerable intellect, and, as one biography refers to her, a "brilliant mistress of cynical satire." Their courtship grew out of a literary correspondence that one writer refers to as a "battle of strong wills." By most accounts, theirs was a strong, rich marriage. She was completely supportive of and helpful to Carlyle in his efforts. They lived quite comfortably, but not without challenges. One of the best known occurred in 1835, when Carlyle lent the only copy of his latest manuscript, The French Revolution, to his friend, John Stuart Mill. Somehow, one of Mill's servants tossed it into the fire, and it was completely destroyed. Devastated, Mill himself called upon Carlyle to bring him the news, and although Carlyle was of course distraught upon hearing what had happened, he was so concerned for Mill that he is reported to have said "Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up. We must endeavor to hide from him how very serious this business is for us." In time, thanks in large part to his wife's unflinching support, he rewrote the book, and continued on to publish numerous other important works.
Some years into their marriage, her health began to decline. He remained deeply involved in his work. After all, he was one of the most important figures of the Victorian age! And he spent less and less time with her. Towards the last years of her life especially, he rarely took the time to stay with her for very long.
The day she died in 1866 was miserable. It was raining hard, and the mud was deep. Following the funeral, Carlyle went back to his home. He was taking it pretty hard. He truly did love her. He went up the stairs to her room and sat down in the chair next to her bed. He sat there thinking about how little time he had spent with her, and wishing he had a chance to do it differently. Noticing her diary on a table beside the bed, he picked it up and began to read from it.
He was shocked. On one page, there was a single line: "Yesterday he spent an hour with me and it was like heaven: I love him so." He suddenly realized how he had been so busy that he barely noticed her. He turned the pages. What he read broke his heart: "I have listened all day to hear his steps in the hall, but now it is late, and I guess he won't come today." He read a little more, then threw the book down and ran out of the house, Some of his friends found him at the grave, his face buried in the mud. His eyes were red from weeping. He kept repeating over and over again, "If I had only known, if I had only known." He lived for fifteen more years, but made little attempt to ever writer again. One historian relates that he was "weary, bored, and a partial recluse."
There is little doubt that Carlyle believed that he was choosing good. But if only he had chosen life! When it came to his work, he was undaunted -- even a destroyed manuscript could be resurrected. But not when it came to being present for his life partner. It turns out that his resolve was not a matter of his character, but his drive. Obviously, he did not believe that he should be the kind of husband he turned out to be -- he just never lived out the values about which he wrote so articulately.
I want to confess something to you today -- it is a good day for such things. I needed to struggle with this notion for a long time before I came to embrace it. And having embraced it, I will continue to spend the rest of my life working at harmonizing my ideals and my behavior. Like Carlyle, there was someone in my life to whom I did not give proper regard. In my case, it was not a matter of not paying attention to him, but not paying him the respect he deserved. That person was my father. And he passed away long before I came to recognize that contrary to what I had thought about him for so many years, he, in fact, embodied success -- true success. He has been gone for nearly a quarter of a century, but his influence still guides and inspires me. I just never told him that -- until about seven and a half years after he had passed away.
Seventeen years ago, I gave a sermon on this same topic, about what it means to be a success. It was in the course of writing that sermon that I came to grips with the fact that I had been following a false notion of success most of my life, and that it had affected the way I thought of him and how I related to him. So I took a page from our Jewish tradition: Maimonides teaches that even after death, one can do teshuvah towards someone he or she has wronged. Once any lingering effects of the wrongdoing have been addressed, the person doing teshuvah goes to the grave of the deceased, wronged party in the presence of a minyan, and honestly, fully offers apology and begs forgiveness. Believing that my father's soul could be accessed anywhere, I chose instead to do my teshuvah many hundreds of miles from his grave, and in front of a very large minyan -- an entire congregation assembled for Yom Kippur.
I shared a letter that I wrote to him, telling him how much I loved him, and that I knew that neither of us had ever questioned that. But I also admitted that I had never thought of him as a success. Successful people had money. They lived in nice, big houses, and didn't cram a family of four into a small two-bedroom apartment. Successful people went to work in offices, wearing suits and ties: they did not spend their days walking from behind a counter to a walk-in refrigerator, wielding a meat cleaver, and wearing the blood-stained apron of a kosher butcher. I ultimately came to say the most important words I ever said to my father: That being successful is not to be measured in terms of prestige or wealth. Success is simply being the human being that you truly want to be - no more, and certainly, no less.
Without knowing it, I then paraphrased Ralph Waldo Emerson's definition of success, which goes as follows:
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success."
At that time, Rabbi Harold Kushner had recently published a book entitled When All You Ever Wanted Isn't Enough. In it, he offered a model for success similar to that of Emerson's, presented as the supreme Jewish model of success: the Mensch. I quoted him directly. This is what he said:
"To be a Mensch is to be the kind of person God had in mind when he arranged for human beings to evolve, someone who is honest, reliable, wise enough to no longer be naïve, but not yet cynical, a person you can trust to give you advice for your own benefit, rather than for his or her own. A Mensch acts not out of fear or out of the desire to make a good impression, but out of a strong, inner conviction of who he or she is and what he or she stands for. A Mensch is not a saint or a perfect person but a person from whom all falsehood, all selfishness, all vindictiveness have been burned away so that only a pure self remains. A Mensch is whole and is one with his or her God."
Of course, I concluded by acknowledging to my father that by this time-honored Jewish definition of success, he had succeeded mightily -- and I will tell you that 17 years later, my prayer continues to be that, like him, I, too, can know that my life has been a success.
Writing that letter changed my life, because it changed the way I think about the world. Without realizing it, I had written my father's eulogy, years after the fact -- but not too late to consider how my own eulogy, or at least my own obituary, might read.
Yes, Yom Kippur forces us to think about what it would be like to read our own obituaries, but it is not the day for writing them!
For as long as we have breath there is still time to change the content.
How might we define success? Perhaps by answering a single question that we each should ask ourselves today: when I die, will the world be poorer for my absence, or just less crowded?
May this day of atonement, this day of at-one-ment with ourselves and with our God, bring us back to our truest selves.
See, I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil;
I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live.
Hashiveinu Adonai, v'nashuva, chadesh Yameinu k'kedem.
Turn us Oh God, and we shall return. Renew our days, as of old.
Amen.