Hide and Seek: A Sermon for Rosh Hashanah, 5766

I recently had the privilege of doing a funeral for the brother of a congregant. This was not your typical funeral. Nor was it your typical brother of a congregant! The man who died had spent much of his life writing and teaching poetry. And he had also spent much of his life struggling with addiction, at times sleeping on benches and wandering the streets. From a young age, he had been diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder that wreaked havoc on his life and on his family. From childhood up until his death, his sister, a member of our community, had dedicated a large part of her life, to taking care of him.

I was both surprised and not surprised to learn about this side to this Temple member’s life. I was surprised because I didn’t know her all that well before being invited to do the funeral, and I had no idea that she had been carrying this burden. I was not surprised because I already had a great deal of respect for her, with the limited amount of knowledge I had of her. I had a sense that there was a story there, hidden away.

I share this with you because it taught me something about our relationships with each other – whether with others in our Temple community, at work, or even our own friends and families. We might see the same person week after week at Shabbat services, day after day around a conference room table and not have the faintest idea of what they are going through.

We operate on assumptions. We assume that if somebody looks “together” that they don’t have burdens. There is a kind of veneer of civility in which we dwell with each other. We don’t share with each other the things that are most important….

But when we just continue to dance across the surface of our lives with each other, to play hide and seek with each other, never really connecting in a meaningful way, it is difficult for deep and lasting change to occur.

This game of hide and seek goes back to the days of the Creation of the world, when Adam and Eve were living in the Garden of Eden….

This is the time of year when the shofar rings out with God’s question “Ayeka?” Where are you?” And we evaluate ourselves, assessing where we are in relation to God - where we are in relation to each other and the world….

The process of teshuvah – of atonement – is like that game of hide and seek. We don’t know how we have hurt someone until we seek it out and they tell us. The moment leading up to the uncovering is full of anxiety – our palms may actually sweat – but the discovery itself can be cathartic, and the apology and forgiveness that follow have the potential to be exhilarating. We have bridged the gap between us, we are once again connected.

Now I want you to imagine what the world might look like if we could play that hide and seek game, not only with those closest to us, but with our neighbors, and with people who seem very different from us…. [Rachel imagines a conversation between a donor and a recipient of the Temple's food donations]

Imagine taking part in a conversation with a US soldier, who has recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne Division, and Munia Arar, a Canadian citizen whose husband was rendered by the US to a Syrian prison for the purposes of interrogation.
The US soldier might tell us, as three other former members of that division recently reported, that soldiers in their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves1….
After hearing this American soldier’s story, imagine turning to Munia Arar and hearing about her husband’s year of hell. In September 2002, Munia’s husband Maher, a Syrian-born citizen of Canada, was detained at an airport in the US.2 He had left a family vacation in Tunisia early and was making his way back to Canada to his job as a software engineer. Munia didn’t see him again until a year later….

If we as citizens were to seek out substantive conversations about torture with each other – conversations like the one we just imagined – and if these conversations could be replicated among Americans across our country, we would find that the reports of torture are actually connected to us. We would realize that our neighbors down the street have children in the US military and that the veiled Muslim woman we always see at the Albertson’s has a cousin who has been detained without trial. The hidden suffering of those being tortured and the hidden burdens of those participating in it are the suffering and the burdens of our neighbors, our fellow citizens, our fellow human beings….

We are all engaged in a complex game of hide and seek – and we’re pretty good at the hiding part. The tragedy is that we forget the seeking part. We forget to seek out each other’s faces, seek out each other’s stories, seek out the ways in which we are connected.

We forget how to ask, “Ayeka?” “Where are you?”

When we do remember to seek connection with our community and our nation, in sin and in blessing, we are on the path towards encountering God.

And then God counts down and calls out to us, “Ready or not, here I come!!”

Footnotes

1: New York Times 9.24.05 Page A-1

2: From 60 Minutes II January 21, 2004. Full story can be found at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/21/60II/main594974.shtml