Sermon / Rosh Hashanah, Day Two 5763

Sermon / Rosh Hashanah, Day Two 5763

Modesty Amidst Modernity

News item from the tennis world:

Little was ordinary about the start of the US Open for third-seeded Tommy Haas, from being ordered to change out of a sleeveless shirt to three straight double faults in the fifth set. Haas showed up for Wednesday's first-round match wearing a white muscle shirt, that revealed ...his shoulders.

Gasp!

It wasn't nearly as provocative as the zip-down, stop-at-the-thighs black Lycra outfit (Serena) Williams was wearing.

Nonetheless, it caught the attention of chair umpire Norm Chryst. He alerted tournament referee Brian Earley, who turned on the TV, looked at Haas, and ruled that the shirt had to go.

Earley cited Article III, Section C of the Grand Slam rule book: "Every player shall dress and present himself for play in a professional manner. Clean and customarily acceptable tennis attire shall be worn as determined by each respective Grand Slam."

Haas – who said sleeves annoy him – had polo shirts with him and wore those for the 3-hour, 23-minute match.

"On the women's tour, you see Serena and all those other ladies wearing tight stuff," Haas said. "It's something new, brings something else to the game."

How revealing this story is (no pun intended) – especially because the subject is a male. All too often, the butt of institutional jabs at racy attire is directed at the female sex. The Haas story represents, in a manner of speaking, a measure of egalitarianism ... and a reminder about an ethic that has been kept by Jews throughout their history.

The Prophet Micah, in addressing his generation, attempted to simplify the responsibility toward the covenant when he derived his famous formula: You have been told what is good and what the Eternal One requires of you: to act justly, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God (6:8). The last of those directives, however, basic and adaptive to the individual it seems at first blush, was captured by the Tradition and transformed into a banner for the moral conscience of a Jew.

Rabbi Maurice Lamm comments on this instruction, which reads in Hebrew V'hatzneah lechet im Hashem Elokekha:

"By far the most significant standard for dressing Jewishly is modesty, or tzni'ut. Tzni'ut in this sense means sexual integrity.

Clothing designed to expose or highlight parts of the body in order to attract or arouse the opposite sex is prohibited by Jewish

law ... blindly following the fashions of the times is not harmless. The laws of tzni'ut are a reflection of a morality that Judaism

holds dear. Dressing with tzni'ut tells the world that you are a person of sound values and solid upbringing."

(Living Torah in America, p. 25)

This is not a sermon about dress codes, nor do I intend this morning to localize any one behavior as the epitome of p'rishut,

which is in Hebrew the polar opposite of tzni'ut. Such a discussion will be reserved for more interactive forums, such as the ritual committee and perhaps our listserve discussion group. Rather, my intent today is to illustrate how our tolerance of contemporary behaviors – both in the synagogue and in our lives – undermines the fundamental Jewish precepts of loving the self, and of paying genuine honor to others.

On this anniversary of Creation, it behooves us to start with the original plan for humanity:

When God created the world, He gave everything a limit. He limited Himself by limiting how far He revealed Himself to the

world, and by containing Himself to a certain degree.

It was part of God's plan that He gave everything a limit, everything its borders. By giving us borders, God gave us a sense

of security, not through self-esteem or ego, but through morality.

Morality is the border that makes us who we are. It is the framework that gives us a sense of self, a sense of separateness, and a sense of stability.

If our lives are not quite right today, if our relationships need fixing, if we want to know how to solve the problems of

society, the solution is to strengthen our border: and by that we mean our morality.

Rabbi Manis Friedman, author of Why Doesn't Anyone Blush Anymore? comments:

"Our society is convinced that we can flirt with borders and never really violate them.

... That's what modesty is all about. It is the curtain that marks the transition – the border – from what is not ours to what is ours, from what is not personal to what is personal, from what is not private to what is private."

"The paths of Adonai are straight--the righteous walk on them whereas the wicked stumble and fall on them," taught Hosea.

The prophet expresses one of the great paradoxes of human life and behavior. Most often good and evil actions are not polar opposites. The choice between good and evil is typically not a simple turn toward one direction or the other. As the Talmud puts it: "The line between Heaven and Hell is as wide as a hair's breadth."

The line between prudence and irresponsible caution, the line between open-mindedness and opportunism or trendiness, the line between pluralism and relativism, the line between determined faith and fanaticism--all are shifting, subtle, hard to define, subject to judgment and misjudgment. Whether the line is overstepped depends on whether the person acting is driven by egotistic distortion or mature responsibility.

How then do we know when we do it right?

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg offers:

"We must exercise our freedom covenantally. The outcome often depends on our maturity, our self-critical awareness, our sincerity. In the end, there is no guarantee. That is why there are no substitutes for conscience and correction."

Here is where the structure of the halacha, the blueprint for living a good and righteous life, helps us to clarify our sense of Jewish self. Rabbi Brad Artson – who is among the most liberal of Conservative rabbis – cautions us in our tacit acceptance of individuation:

" Without a binding structure for maintaining consensus, Judaism rapidly dissolves into a combination of nostalgia, good intentions and contemporary politics. No longer able to hold together a people, each individual fashions their own faith out of the inherited remains of the past, and then everybody calls their own hodgepodge, "Judaism."

'Halakhah' cuts through that solipsism, forcing people to integrate the needs of their neighbors and coreligionists, an awareness of God and the sacred, and the highest ideals of human morality. In an age of lonely individuals coming together to try to foster a sense of meaning without impinging on autonomy, Jewish law forges us into a community, with a framework to channel and guide our individuality. Finally, 'halakhah' extends the realm of the sacred and the moral beyond a once-a-week (or once-a-year) peek into a prayerbook or a synagogue. Instead, Judaism becomes the prism through which we refract all the rays of light from every aspect of our lives, sanctifying and elevating every moment, every deed and every place."

Conventional wisdom has it that the woman who returns to her modesty is hiding, running away from sex. This is because today modesty is often confused with prudery. But it is not prudery. Indeed, promiscuity is really much closer to prudery. Modesty is prudery's true opposite, because it admits that one can be moved and issues a specific invitation for one man to try.

Promiscuity and prudery are both a kind of antagonistic indifference, a running away from the meaning of one's place in the world, whereas modesty is fundamentally about knowing, protecting that knowledge, and directing it to something higher, beyond just two. Something more than just man and wife. "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife and they shall become one flesh."

In outlining her thesis of equality through separation, author Wendy Shalit provides suggestions for how we might view the role

of males and females as like-minded subscribers to modesty:

"The need is not for nonsexist upbringing, but for precisely a good dose of sexist upbringing: how to relate as a man to a woman. Today we want to pretend there are no differences between the sexes, and so when they first emerge ... we try to cure them of what is distinctive instead of cherishing these differences and directing them towards each other in a meaningful way."

While I am hesitant to make a "blanket statement" (or, should I say a "tallis statement"?) about what does and does not give

women a sense of validity as equal partners on and off the bimah, I can testify that when females take the courageous step of

wearing a kippah and/or prayer shawl and males by the same token opt for a bigger tallis than the garden variety prayer shawl that hang on the rack in the lobby, they draw mixed reviews from the wider population. Such ambiguity on the receiving end of what should be an embrace of deeper commitment and heightened sanctity tellsme that many have intuited our religious garb as a fashion statement and not an emanation from the heart that resides beneath the garb.

The great equalizer on the playing field of religious egalitarianism, then, lurks deeper than the surface of our apparel. It harks

back to the common decency that we assign to men qua men and women qua women, an integrity that reserves revelation for

God and the gauge of our scrutiny to the realm of actions rather than appearances.

... The medieval Jewish writers stressed the great quality of modesty in terms such as these: "The noblest of all ornaments is modesty." "Man's finest virtue is that of which he is unaware." "Modesty is humility and wisdom combined." "A small act done modestly is a thousandfold more acceptable to God than a big act done in pride."

In Love and Awakening, John Welwood uses the analogy of a castle to illustrate the world within us. Imagine being a magnificent castle with long hallways and thousands of rooms. Every room in the castle is perfect and possesses a special gift. Each room represents a different aspect of oneself and is an integral part of the entire perfect castle.

... The castle is a metaphor for sacred place inside ourselves. It is easily accessed if we are ready and willing to see the totality of who we are.

Our physical and inner self constitutes a sacred arena that deserves our recognition. We do ourselves such harm and dishonor by failing to appreciate that sanctity of beauty every single day. What's more, it is such a vast beauty that the Sages assigned not one but two daily blessings in appreciation of our holiness.

After first marveling at the wondrous nature of the systemic nature of the guf –the body, which is marvelous in structure and intricate in design, the religious Jew goes on to recite a b'rachah over the neshama -- the soul:

The soul which You, my God, have given to me is pure. You created it, You formed it, You breathed it into me; You keep body and soul together. ... So long as this soul is within me I acknowledge you, Adonai my God, my ancestors' God, Master of all creation, sovereign of all souls.

Now that we have come full circle, and are poised to recognize God as Creator and Sovereign, which is indeed the upshot of our Rosh Hashanah theology. I am going to give my side of the bimah a rest. But I hope that this will not be the end of the search for the re-tooling of our culture – something over which we have great control – so as to celebrate and not denigrate the holiness of the self.

Getting there, however, is something for which we need each other's encouragement and support.

There's an old story about a little boy who was out helping dad with the yard work. Dad asked him to pick up the rocks in a certain area of the yard. Dad looked over and saw him struggling to pull up a huge rock buried in the dirt. The little boy struggled and struggled while Dad watched. Finally, the boy gave up and said, "I can't do it." Dad asked, "Did you use all of your strength?" The little boy looked hurt and said, "Yes, sir. I used every ounce of strength I have." The father smiled and said, "No you didn't. You didn't ask me to help." The father walked over and then the two of them pulled that big rock out of the dirt.

Together, let us loosen some rocks before they become embedded too deep for our collective good.