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Sermon: Rosh Hashanah – 1st Day
“From Kvetching to Meaning”
Metuchen 5774/2013
Rabbi Gerald L. Zelizer
One of God’s jobs today is to listen to our
prayers. That includes listening to our kvetching.
The job we all have to do this morning is to switch
from kvetching to meaning. I suggest that will
make God happpier.
Kvetching is defined as “complaining
persistently and whiningly.” A psychology
professor at Bowdoin College, Barbara Held, has
written a book: “Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching” – a
five step guide to creative complaining. The
chapter headings are indicative of her legitimating
and praising the value of kvetching. Chapter 2
“Why We Need to Kvetch.” Another chapter –
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“The Five Step Guide to Creative Kvetching”; –
“Obstacles to Creative Kvetching”, or “The
Tyranny of the Positive Attitude.” Chapter 9 –
“Famous Creative and Non-creative Kvetchers.”
I think if we take seriously a recent study
by the World Health Organization in Harvard
Medical School, kvetching contributes to us
Americans being the unhappiest people on earth.
The study found that almost 10% of Americans
suffer from depression or bipolar disorder. Some,
of course, are depressed because of serious
medical conditions; others, because of attitude to
life. The U.S. is the highest of fourteen nations
surveyed! We are the “Prozac Nation.” We have a
greater percentage of depressed people than wartorn Lebanon, jobs starved Mexico, over-worked
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social rigid Japan. We even have a higher rate of
depression than Nigeria, with its desperate
poverty, rampant corruption and violent tribal
conflict. How can this be? Well, observes Brett
Stephens in the Wall Street Journal, “maybe if
your life is a struggle for clean water and
adequate food, you don’t have time to indulge in
being unhappy over luxuries! Maybe.”
Have you noticed, whether in prime time
or politics, the contestants and candidates with
the most traction are frequently the contestants
with the gravest trials: afflictions, addictions, lost
loves, lost dogs. It seems that if there aren’t any
epic setbacks in your biography, your political
consultants or your “Voice” producers will find and
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amplify whatever causes for kvetching do exist.
As some have observed already:
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Christine Quinn, the mayoral candidate
revealed she’d struggled with bulimia and
alcoholism;
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In last Fall’s presidential race Ann Romney
remembered the basement apartment and
tuna casseroles;
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Elizabeth Warren, professor at Harvard and
Senior Senator from Mass., had to wait
tables at 13.
American idol winner in 2012, Phillip
Phillips, fought through kidney stones; a runner
up on Dancing with the Stars danced with a pro
whose eye she had mistakingly gashed to the
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tune of 17 stitches. I sometimes think it should be
called “Glatt Kvetching.”
More subtly, a dying mother in the current
Broadway play, “The Assembled Parties” reminds
her children: “The sense of neglect is the last to
go.”
A writer, Joyce Wadler, in her regular blog,
calls one, “Who Suffers Most?” She tells how as a
kid she grew up in a “tact-free” resort town in the
Catskills. A sign entering the town says “Entering
Fleischmanns, say whatever you want.” She tells
how a resident of the town would barely say: “I
buried my father three weeks ago, I’m 54 but I feel
an orphan,” before they would be interrupted
“that’s nothing compared to what happened to
me. My father was in the hospital three years ago,
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my mother walks in, she’s so upset she has a
heart-attack right there in the room and drops
dead. Two days later he dies. I’ll never get over
it.” Or, a girlfriend says “Giacomo dumped me. I
don’t believe it. His mother, the whole family,
loved me.” A good friend interrupts her “That’s
nothing. I was seeing this lovely married man, we
had tickets for a cruise, and he cancels just
because his wife was hit by a bus.” Glatt
kvetching.
I can tell you what I hear in my study and I
read between the lines outside of my study
as your rabbi for so many years. Too many
of us are unhappy – read kvetch about our
lives. Lots of us kvetch about our work;
some of us kvetch about our spouses;
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others kvetch about our parents or children.
A few even kvetch about ourselves. Top
kvetch is “If only I had done this instead of
that. You’re so lucky. What did I do wrong?”
Kvetching about our life situation, to
our spouses and friends, to our neighbors
and even to ourselves, contradicts the
fundamental mood we are supposed to feel
at this Rosh Hashanah. Because when we
blow the shofar it says “ Ashei Haam Yodei
Teruah
” (Psalm 86, vs. 16-17) – “Happy
are those who know the sound of the
teruah.” Happy, not kvetching. But not
“happy” as in “Happy New Year.”
So what does that passage on the shofar
telling us not to kvetch but “
Ashrei
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Haam Yodei Teruah
– “Happy are those who
know the sound of the shofar” really mean? We
know that the shofar sound is supposed to stir us,
to alarm us, to trouble us. But how is it supposed
to make us happy? Well, I found the answer in a
Midrashic book called Vayikra Rabba on Leviticus
29-4 which says “Mai taam: ‘Oleh Elohim
Batruah?: “What does the Book of Psalms mean
when it says God ascends at the sound of the
teruah mean? It’s answer “Beshaah Sheyisroel
Notlin Et Shofrehen V,Tokin Lifnei Hakadosh
Baruch Hu “” – when he sees the children of
Israel take the shofar and sound it the Almighty
“ Omed Mkesseh hadin V’yoshev Mikeseh
Harachamim” - ,changes his seat from the chair of
judgment to the chair of mercy.” So “happiness”
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Jewishly – the reverse of kvetching – has nothing
to do with income, age, children, parents or even
ourselves. Happiness has to do with concretely
contributing to more merciful and compassionate
world by persuading the Almighty, through the
blowing of the shofar, to chip in! Happiness has to
do with giving rather than taking. It has to do with
the moving of the locus from our concern away
from kvetching about what we deserve from
others and from the world, and back to what we
the world and others deserve from us.
And that is what is meant by a passage in
the Talmud of Ketubot. It notes: The Book of
Psalms (Psalms-106:3) also says “Happy are
those who keep justice, do righteousness all the
time?” The Talmud asks: V’chi Efshar Laasot
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Tzedekah Bchol Et”? ” How is it possible to do
righteousness all the time? This, explains, Rabbi
Samuel Ben Nahmani, refers to a man who brings
up an orphaned child in his house and enables
them to marry. Or, to a person who writes the
Torah, the prophets, and the Writings and then
lends those writings to others. Did you notice what
is the common denominator of all those acts of
righteousness which minimize kvetching bring
happiness and meaning? It is not doing for myself
but enabling of others to maximize their lives, like
the models of raising an orphaned child to
marriage, or lending the sacred Scriptures to
others.
That the first point, that we should strive
consciously to be a worthwhile, contributing
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human being, well beyond our own personal
needs. That will go a long way to lessen our
sense of us being cheated in life – and kvetching
about it.
Actually, to be more precise, maybe we
should kvetch- but kvetch about the right things!
Not about ourselves. But what is beyond ourself.
We should kvetch about poverty in this
rich nation and no matter how we may differ on
the solution. That shows we are concerned. And
along with the kvetch, a suggested solution.
How exactly to move from kvetching to
meaning in our personal lives this year? The best
example of how to find that is the life and a book
by Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist
and neurologist in Vienna during the war. Frankl
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was arrested and transported to a Nazi
concentration camp with his wife and parents.
Three years later when his camp was liberated
most of his family including his pregnant wife had
perished. But he prisoner number 119104 had
lived. In his best-selling 1946 book, “Man’s
Search for Meaning,” Frankl tells us from
experience how to live with meaning. He argues
that meaning in life is discovered in two ways: By
doing a good deed; by encountering another
person, even through terrible suffering, as in the
camps. He says that some survived in the camps
not just because of good fortune, which they did
but also because they looked for meaning in their
suffering, like regarding that suffering as
“sacrifice.”
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In his book Frankl gives an example of two
suicidal inmates he encountered at the camps. He
writes that they were hopeless. That they had
nothing to live for. “In both cases,” Frankl writes “it
was a question of getting them to realize that life
was still expecting something from them.” For one
man, it was his young child who was then living in
a foreign, for the other, a scientist, it was a series
of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes “a
man who becomes conscious of the responsibility
he bears towards a human being who
affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished
work, he will never be able to throw away his life.
He knows the “Why” for his existence, and will be
able to bear almost any “How.”
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According to the Center for Disease
Control and Prevention about four out of ten
Americans have not discovered a satisfying life
purpose. The Center study distinguishes between
the happy life and the meaningful life differ?
Happiness they found, is about feeling good. The
happy life is defined by a lack of stress or worry.
Most importantly from a social perspective the
pursuit of happiness is associated with a selfish
behavior – being a “taker” rather than a “giver.”
One of the authors of the study (Kathleen Vohs)
writes “Happy people get a lot of joy from
receiving benefits from others, while people
leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from
giving to others.”
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So what are the life patterns of giving and
not taking? Having more meaning in one’s life
was associated with doing activities like; buying
presents for others, taking care of kids and even
arguing with others. People whose lives have high
levels of meaning achieve meaning even at the
expense of happiness. Having children, for
example, requires self-sacrifice, but it obviously
results in high levels of meaning.
Secondly, I have said that meaning in life
requires transcending one’s self. It also requires
transcending the moment. Happiness is here and
now. Meaning may not be here and now, but in
the overall and future. Meaning endures. It
connects the past to the future. Thinking about the
past or future is clearly one of the large themes of
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Judaism. Is not today called “
” “Yom
Hazikron” The Day of Remembrance?
A story Frankl tells which will illustrate
thinking beyond the moment. He had a terrible
decision to make. With his career on the rise and
the threat of Nazis looming, Frankl applied for a
visa to America. It was granted in 1941. By then
the Nazis started rounding up the Jews and taking
them away. They focused on the elderly first.
Frankl knew that it would only be time before the
Nazis came to take his parents away. He was at a
loss for what to do. He set out for St. Stephens
Cathedral in Vienna to clear his head. Listening to
the organ music, he asked himself “Should I leave
my parents behind? Should I say goodbye and
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leave them to their fate? He was looking for a
“hint from heaven.”
He returned from home and found the hint.
A piece of marble was lying on the table. His
father explained that the marble was from the
rubble of a nearby synagogue that the Nazis had
destroyed. It contained a fragment of one of the
Ten Commandments. What was that fragment? –
The one about honoring your father and mother.
With that Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and
forgo the visa. He put aside his individual pursuits
to serve his family, and later, other inmates in the
camps. In other words he found meaning in his
overall life, even at the expense of happiness and
self-interests. He lived both beyond himself, and
beyond the moment, “Giving,” rather than
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“Taking.” Like what is meant by: “Happy are those
who hear the sound of the shofar.”
I think a song in the Broadway hit Matilda
sums up the backdrop to my theme this morning.
“If you’re stuck in your story and want to get out,
you don’t have to cry and you don’t have to
shout.”
I wish you to go beyond kvetching, beyond
happiness. I wish that you transcend your
personal kvetches reach meaning in your life.
“Happy are those who hear the sound of the
shofar.”
Leshana Tova