Rosh Hashanah 5776 Rabbi Gorban

Who Are You?

Erev Rosh HaShanah 5776 Rabbi Keren Gorban

The mayor of Plotsk was an extraordinarily wealthy merchant. But his generosity and honesty were equal to his wealth, so he was beloved by the people of his town. To counsel him as both mayor and merchant, he had many advisors, among them a poor man called Moishe. When the time came for the mayor to die, he called his young son Shlomo to his bedside and said to him, “My son, if your judgments are fair and your heart is generous, you will command the respect of everyone in the town. Do as I have done and you will continue to prosper.

“I shall,” promised Shlomo.

“But even the wisest man,” continue the father, “sometimes finds himself beset by doubts and trials. If that should happen to you, call upon the beggar Moishe, who has been one of my most trusted advisors. He will never fail you.”

Shlomo promised to do all that his father had asked, but in his heart he thought, “Let me never sink so low that I have to go to a beggar for help!”

When the mayor of Plotsk died, Shlomo inherited his father’s wealth, wisdom, and generosity. He kept his promise to his father and was soon elected to become mayor as his father had been. The people loved him even more than they had loved his father. But in time, Shlomo became enamored of his wealth and power and sought to gain more. The poor suffered quite a bit due to Shlomo’s greediness, but never so much as the day when Shlomo decided to banish them from the town.

Moishe, who had long been ignored by Shlomo, went to his manor to plead for a reprieve. But his pleas fell on deaf ears.

“By this time tomorrow,” declared Shlomo, “I do not want to find a single beggar within the borders of this town. Any beggar who remains behind will face death!”

Brokenhearted, Moishe returned home, where he prepared himself to leave his home and his town.

As soon as Moishe was gone, Shlomo entered his bedroom to eat his breakfast. As he gazed out of the window, he saw a beautiful white gazelle limping in the garden below.

Seizing his bow and arrow, he ran outside. The gazelle bounded off into the woods, and Shlomo chased after her. But no matter how fast he ran after he, the white gazelle ran still faster, and he never seemed to get any closer to her. After hours of pursuit, he noticed that the shadows had lengthened on the forest floor and that the sky was rapidly growing darker. “I shall have to sleep in the forest tonight,” Shlomo thought to himself. “Perhaps the deer will make her bed nearby and I can catch her in the morning.”

He gathered leaves and moss to make a bed for himself and lay down for the night.

When he awoke the next day, he realized that he was lost. As for the gazelle, she was nowhere in sight. For the next sixty days he wandered, ragged and hungry in the forest, scavenging for food and making a makeshift bed each night.

The man stared at Shlomo as though he were a madman. Enraged, Shlomo raised his hand to strike the man, but then he looked down at himself. On his feet were strips of skin from a wild animal he had killed, and his clothes were ragged and threadbare. He knew that his face was covered with a wild beard and that his hair fell long and dirty around his neck.

He tried again. “I am a poor wanderer, lost in the forest. Could you spare a few scraps of bread and provide me a pallet of straw for the night?”

The woodchopper felt sorry for the ragged stranger and took him home. The woodchopper gave him food, a sturdy set of clothes, and a warm bed. The next day, the woodchopper gave Shlomo an axe and took him into the woods to chop wood.

For the next sixty days, Shlomo worked hard for his new master. For the first time in a long time, he went to sleep each night content. But he also longed for home, so he took his meager wages and set out to try to find his way. As he wandered from town to town, he bought, begged, and bartered for a little food and a place to rest for the night. After months and months, he finally reached his town of Plotsk.

As he approached his manor, he noticed smoke coming from the chimney— someone was living in his house! This time, he knew better than to reveal his true identity to guards at the gate. Surely they would not believe that this ragged and dirty wanderer was their master. So he nosed about the town to find out who was living in his house and who had taken over the role of mayor. To his astonishment, there was no word of any change—an imposter must have stolen his place!

He went back to his manor to try to glimpse the imposter and found himself looking through the gate into the garden where he had first seen the gazelle. His thoughts were disrupted by the sound of Moishe hurrying home with a troubled look upon his face.

Shlomo suddenly remembered his father’s dying words: “If you ever find yourself in trouble, go to the beggar Moishe.”

“Kind sir,” Shlomo said, “will you help me now as you once helped my father?”

Openmouthed, Moishe stared at the wretched young man standing before him. Then he recognized Shlomo under the torn clothes and wild beard. He took Shlomo home, gave him a new suit of clothing, cut his hair and beard, and set a meal before him. “Now tell me, friend, what evil fortune has befallen you?”

“Have you heard nothing of my disappearance?” cried Shlomo. And he told Moishe of all that had happened since he began to chase the white gazelle. “And now, please, tell me who has taken my home and my place?”

Moishe took Shlomo back to the manor and led him through a series of hidden hallways until they reached Shlomo’s bedroom.

“Where is he?!” cried Shlomo as he burst into his bedroom. “Where’s the imposter?” But there was nobody there. The room was empty.

Amazed, Shlomo stared into the mirror, barely recognizing his own image.

From then on, Shlomo returned to the lessons that his father had taught him. He gave generously and treated everyone fairly. And once again, he was beloved by the people of his town.

Imagine that you are looking into a mirror. What do you see? Does the reflection you see in your mind’s eye match the one you saw when you looked in the mirror this morning? There’s no need to be shy about the answer, you’re only telling yourself. And I know that the story I just told makes it sound like the right answer is that you see the same thing. But I’ll be the first to admit, sometimes I look in the mirror and wonder, who’s that?! and what happened to the person I saw there five, ten years ago?!

What has happened? Well, for starters, life has happened. Jewish tradition often compares life to a path. I imagine a very wide dirt road that has many different terrains and obstacles across the width and along its endless length. Sometimes the path is smooth, flat, and easy to traverse. Other times it’s rocky or hilly or maybe it even blends into the terrain around it making it hard to see where you’re supposed to go. The path is wide enough and varied enough that many of us can walk together without having the same experiences, but it’s also narrow enough to limit the number of good and righteous options that we have.

Our choices—significant and minor alike—can lead us toward smoother or rougher terrain on the path, or they can bring us to its edges, or they may even lead us off the path entirely. We may even see something that looks like a side trail that was actually made by many people straying from the path.

The steps we take, each one of which represents a different decision, when added together, make a unique track that tells the story of our lives. Hopefully our respective tracks show an accurate picture of who we are at our core, with a few mistakes here and there.

But sometimes we find that we’re on a different track than the one we originally planned to follow. Things happen—life happens. A move, an illness or death in the family, even joyous occasions like a job offer, marriage, or the addition of children to the family— all of these can shift our needs and our priorities. We may be willing, even happy to deviate from the track we had been going down to address the new needs or opportunities that arise, until all of a sudden we look into the mirror and we don’t entirely recognize ourselves. Something may have gotten lost along the way that needs to be recovered, that needs to return.

One of my friends from college, Jenn, was interested in becoming a nurse. She had the grades to get into a good nursing program, a personality that would make her patients feel at ease, and a wonderful ability to explain things clearly. The summer before senior year of college, Jenn found a job tutoring kids at a private school in the city where she was from. The principal of the school liked her so much that he offered her a job as a science teacher once she graduated. Jenn was excited—she liked the tutoring that she had done and who wouldn’t want a decently paying job right out of college? So she took the job and started her career as a teacher. Jenn enjoyed teaching. The kids were wonderful, she felt that her work was meaningful, she liked the school and found it to be a good place to work.

The only problem was that it wasn’t what she really wanted to do. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Jenn taught for a few years until the positives of the job couldn’t outweigh the fact that she felt like she was stuck in the wrong place. Teaching was good,

but it wasn’t her, and little things began to irritate her because she didn’t want to be there. So she started taking nursing courses at night, left her teaching job, and now loves her position as a nurse at a hospital out-patient clinic.

Jenn’s decision to teach was certainly not a bad decision, but it led her away from who she was. Luckily for her, it was easy to figure out what changes she needed to make, and it was relatively easy for her to return to who she is and what she loves to do. It’s not always so easy, though. Often it requires more soul-searching and sometimes a more challenging process of acquiring the necessary skills and resources to find a more fulfilling path. Some of us have strayed a little farther than Jenn did from the core of who we are.

And some of us have gone so far astray that we barely recognize ourselves at all. We see our deeds laid out before us and, like Shlomo, we wonder what imposter has taken over our lives…only to discover that we are the imposters. And while it’s possible that these

changes occurred all at once, more often it’s the small decisions that slowly lead us away from who we are and who we want to be. These decisions are so small that their impact is only felt by the fact that making a not-so-good choice once makes it easier to make another and another. As we learn in Pirkei Avot, mitzvah goreret mitzvah, aveirah goreret aveirah— one mitzvah, the fulfillment of one commandment, leads us to doing another mitzvah, while one transgression leads us to another transgression. Our actions, our choices become habits and our habits become our personalities, for better or for worse. But just as one small step away from ourselves can lead to another and another, so too can one small step of return lead us back to ourselves.

For weeks we have opened and closed our Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat services by singing the words “Hashiveinu Adonai eilecha v’nashuvah; chadeish yameinu k’kedem— Help us return to You, Adonai, and we will return; renew our days as they were before.” You’ll hear it again and again throughout the holiday season. It’s one of my favorite verses in the Tanakh, in the Hebrew Bible. This verse, which comes from the end of the book of Lamentations, appears at the end of our Torah services as well. Just before we close the Aron haKodesh, the Ark, as we stand in front of all of our Torah scrolls, we remind

ourselves that the Torah’s “ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace.” The word Torah, by the way, is related to the Hebrew words moreh (teacher) and horim (parents), all of which come from the root yarah, which means to shoot. Each of us is like an arrow shot from a bow once we are born. Whether we reach our target, whether we find and fulfill our purpose in this life, depends on the guidance we have and the choices we make. The Torah, our teachers, and our parents all guide us, at least in theory, to choosing to stay on the path of pleasantness and peace. But when we stray—and we all go off-course at some point or another—we have a regular reminder in the words of Hashiveinu that we can return.

Return, t’shuvah—that is the theme of this season, of the slightly more than two months between the fast day of Tisha b’Av and the end of Sukkot. Turn from the choices that make you your own imposter and return to who you are at your core. Return to your values, return to your priorities, return to your passions. Or, as we have sung each Shabbat, “Return to who you are, return to what you are, return to where you are born and reborn and reborn.”

But how? This is not an easy question to answer. If it was, we’d all have done it by now. It’s certainly not as easy as Shlomo made it look. “Oh, I’m the imposter? Poof, I’ll just magically undo the past thirty years of habits and beliefs and go back to being the same person I was before I strayed from Dad’s teachings.” If only! Habits and beliefs are hard to

change, and they require frequent monitoring and regular course-correction to get back on track. And the farther we’ve strayed, the harder it is to return. Most of us only begin that return when circumstances beyond our control make it impossible to continue on the path we’re on.

Whether circumstances force us to see how lost we are, how far we have strayed, or whether we realize sooner that we’re starting to go off-course, the path of return requires knowing where we are and we’re going. Businesses and organizations do this all the time by developing or redeveloping their mission and vision statements. These mission and vision statements articulate where an organization is, what it wants to do, and where it wants to go. An organization can measure its success by how well it accomplishes its mission. When it starts to deviate, the organization’s leaders do some t’shuvah—they either have to figure out how to put it back on course or they have to revise the mission to fit its current direction.

What if each of us had our own mission statements to guide us through life— something that we could check periodically to see how we’re doing? For each of the two times that I’ve searched for a community to serve, I’ve had to write what is, essentially, my personal mission statement. When I read it, I’m reminded of what’s really important to me as a person and as a rabbi. I can see if I’m accomplishing the overarching task that I have set for myself and if I’m upholding my values. As I return to the same text year after year, I can see if I’ve kept on the right path or if I’ve started to stray. And, when I’ve started to veer off-course, I’ve been able to see if I’m actually heading in a better direction than before or if I need to turn back. In fact, as I reviewed my mission statement at this time last year, I found that I needed to do a little of both—I had to revise my mission and get on the right track to living it. This is the work of t’shuvah that I’ve been focused on over the past year and that I’m working on for the coming year.