​​​​Benjamin Fried​

Back in 1999, we met Lester Berman in the movie American Beauty.  Now, Lester at first appears to be the typical suburban patriarch with a two-story house, white picket fence, and perfectly manicured lawn.  But underneath this façade of comfort and privilege, we find a man in crisis.  Every morning he wakes up hating his life, dreading to go to his corporate job, resenting his wife, and feeling alienated from his daughter.  He feels a sense of hopelessness and deep emasculation at being a cog in the corporate ladder.  His disillusionment eventually reaches a breaking point:  he quits his job, blackmails his boss, and, in a moment of utter absurdity, starts working at a fast food drive-through.  He drives his wife into the arms of another man while fantasizing of having an affair of his own.  To say Lester is having a mid-life crisis would be a spectacular understatement. 

 

Ironically, the movie American Beauty showed us a great deal of the ugliness in American culture.  It held up no pretences as it showed us our perfect American Dream infected by infidelity, broken relationships, persistent dissatisfaction, and drug and alcohol abuse.  By the end of the movie, I found myself asking:  Where does this ugliness come from?  In Lester’s case, I believe the problem is in his vision.  In reflecting on his life, he could see only drudgery and despair, instead of the blessings of good health, financial security, and a loving family.  He has so much abundance, but he is utterly blind to it.  He cannot see that profound beauty truly does exist in his life. 

 

Problems of vision also exist in our tradition.  In Genesis, while Jacob wanders in the wilderness, he falls asleep, resting his head on an unassuming rock.  In a dream, he sees the famous ladder with angels ascending to heaven, and in the midst of this spectacular vision, God promises Jacob that He will always be with him.  When Jacob wakes up, he exclaims:  akhen yesh Adonai bamakom hazeh, v’anokhi lo yadati, “God was in this place, and I did not know.”[1] In the banality of his journey, Jacob could not see the sacred in the place he rested.  Like Lester, his vision was limited, and he missed out on so much beauty, because he did not allow his vision to transcend the mundane.

Of course, these are not just the stories of Lester or Jacob.  They are ours as well.

 

Consider an experiment the Washington Post performed in 2007.  A young man, unassuming in appearance, performed on his violin at a DC Metro stop during morning rush hour.  His performance lasted 43 minutes and encompassed six pieces of exquisite classical music.  Over 1000 people walked by.  Six people stopped to listen, twenty dropped money into his cap without stopping, and the rest rushed by without noticing at all.  In total, he earned $32.17. Now, this unassuming young man, whose performance was clearly a flop, was Joshua Bell, one of the most celebrated musicians of our time.  Two nights before his subway performance, he played a sold-out, $100 per seat concert in Boston, and several months afterwards, he was awarded the Avery Fischer Prize, given to the greatest classical musician in America.[2][3]  The DC commuters were in the presence of something sacred, but they didn’t know it. 

 

This story epitomizes our shocking ability to tune out the beauty around us.  Many people who rush through the motions of their lives develop a tunnel vision, unable to see and connect with the world around them.  This trait has been exacerbated by a cultural shift in recent years, largely fueled by technology and social media.  Teenagers send and receive on average 88 text messages per day, and the expectation of instant response in the corporate world has gotten nearly everyone addicted to checking their phones constantly.[4]  We are inextricably connected to one another, but only through our computer screens.  Interacting with the people right in front of us has become rarer and more difficult, as we close ourselves off into our technological bubbles.  One unintended result of this is that even though we have more ways of reaching each other than ever, we have never felt so alone.  A recent article in Psychology Today asserts that an epidemic of depression and suicide has emerged in this country, an inevitable result of our increasing alienation from each other.[5]  We get caught up in maintaining shallow, remote connections and fail to truly see each other.  Like Jacob, we miss out on so much beauty right in front of us.

 

As we reflect on our lives on this Day of Atonement, I want to draw our attention to one of the sins that we all confessed to in the Ashamnu.  Niatznu:  we spurned and showed contempt for what is sacred.  When confronted with beauty in our lives, we failed to acknowledge it.  We could not see the sacredness in our relationships and took them for granted.  We failed to make positive associations with our work, and instead denigrated it to toil.  When did we treat the sunrise, the baby’s laugh, the twinkle in someone’s eye, and music as though they were utterly mundane?

Despite our best efforts, sometimes we can all see remnants of our own behavior in this sin.  But we have to wake ourselves up and renounce these bad habits to be truly present to life.  This is not a trivial matter; this could mean the difference between a life of meaning or a life unfulfilled.  Yom Kippur reminds us that our days on Earth are numbered and short.  We don’t have the time to not stop and listen to the violinist on the subway.  We don’t have the time to miss the sunset.  We don’t have the time to spend on our phones and not with each other.  So, on this Yom Kippur, how can we stop a gradual descent into living life like drones on autopilot and dedicate ourselves to finally seeing the sacred?

 

One of the best ways to open ourselves up to the beauty around us is to foster a sense of gratitude. Our tradition not only encourages gratitude, it demands it of us.  In the Talmud, Rabbi Meir says that a person is obligated to say 100 blessings every day.[6]  Blessings must be recited for any joy that one receives:  from food, to natural wonders, to momentous occasions in our lives.[7]  One might ask what the point of all this is.  If God is infinite, then surely saying Motzi over a piece of bread or a b’rachah over a rainbow is of little concern to God.  Yes, saying a prayer might not affect God, but singing praise and gratitude does affect us.  So when we forget to say thank you for something, we are stealing, not from the one who gave us the gift, but from ourselves.  We rob ourselves the opportunity to feel a sense of gratitude, to appreciate the blessing that we have received, and to feel blessed ourselves.

 

How much would our entire perspective on life change if we found 100 moments to stop and feel gratitude every day?  Or even 10, or five?  A classmate taught me a spiritual practice that helps direct my mind towards gratitude.  Whenever we pray the Amidah, I always stop at Hoda’ah, the Thanksgiving prayer, to spontaneously think of five things in my life for which I feel thankful.  They usually consist of friends and family that I feel blessed to have.  Sometimes they can be things as simple as the shoes on my feet.  This practice is very simple, but its effect is absolutely profound. I encourage you to try it out for a few days.  When you find a moment alone, stop and ask yourself what has given me joy today?  What have I learned?  When have I felt loved by my friends and family?  When was I able to share my love with them?  By fostering gratitude in our souls, we make our lives holy and see ourselves as connected to something greater.

 

This idea was central to Abraham Joshua Heschel, the most prominent American Jewish theologian of the 20th century.  He believed that the core of spirituality is fostering a sense of radical amazement.  Heschel asserted that we must “get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted.  Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; [we must] never treat life casually.”[8]  Radical amazement teaches us to live our lives with a sense of awe at the universe and that it is our responsibility to train our minds to find the sacred in the world.  When we go into nature or feel a connection to another person, we should cherish the moment and experience the presence of the sacred within it.  Heschel’s philosophy shows us that we have a fundamental choice.  We can live our lives as though everything is mundane, “[sneering] at the stars, [mocking] the dawn, or [scoffing] at the totality of existence,”[9] or we can live the life of the spirit.

We can see this life of the spirit in Albert Einstein, a man who helped uncover many of the mysteries of the universe.  His science attempted to explain the physical universe, and one might expect that he was trying to transform our awe and wonder of the cosmos into mundane science, phenomena completely explainable through mathematical equations.  Not so.  Einstein asserted that his scientific discoveries increased his wonder, for he felt that he was uncovering the mind of God through his physics.  He famously asserted that science without religion was lame.  Even in dry scientific equations, we find the presence of something bigger, for the beauty of the universe permeates everywhere, if we allow ourselves to see it.

Of course, treating our lives as a work of beauty does not just involve radical amazement or finding moments of gratitude, but it also requires us to find meaning in even the mundane parts of our lives and our work.  In reflecting on the work we do in our lives, the Biblical pessimist Ecclesiastes writes:  “All is futility!  What profit does a person have of all their labors under the sun?”[10]  Ecclesiastes speaks to the tediousness that many people feel in their labors.  When we feel unfulfilled, we can sink into this kind of pessimism:  that no matter what we do, we cannot create a lasting accomplishment. 

 

Not willing to succumb to such despair, the Zohar offers a very different view.  It sees the “futility” that Ecclesiastes speaks of as referring to human acts done “under the sun,” that is to say, labors done as a means to an end but which are ultimately tedious and despair inducing.  But there is hope, because the Zohar says that when we direct our work outwards, away from a place of self-centeredness, and towards connecting with others, our work will be done “over the sun.”[11] 

What could the Zohar mean by this?  The answer I find comes from the Torah.  After Adam eats of the Tree of Knowledge, God asks Adam a rather peculiar question:  Ayeka, “where are you?”[12] Rabbi Arthur Green sees this question not as an inquiry into Adam’s location, but as an invitation to step forward from his place of shame and encounter the totality of existence.  Green also sees this question “where are you” as the primordial question that each one of us experiences.  We are all called to question where we are in life, to acknowledge the sacred in the universe, and to contribute through our lives and our work to God’s ever-evolving Creation.[13] We all know people who answer this calling of Ayeka in meaningful ways: from the teachers who shape the next generation; the EMTs, firemen, and police officers who save lives; the nurses and doctors who heal the sick; the businessmen who create new technologies; and the moms and dads who love their children unconditionally.  The question we have to ask ourselves is whether we see our work as a means to earn a living, or whether we see ourselves as answering a calling from the depths of our souls.  Our lives are not mundane and meaningless, and if we see them through the right perspective, we see that there is true sacredness in what we do.

Gratitude, radical amazement, and finding meaning in our work.  These suggestions are not about fundamentally changing the circumstances of our lives, but improving our vision to gain the correct perspective on our lives. One of my favorite Midrashim demonstrates the importance of this kind of perspective.  This Midrash asks what the distance between Paradise and Purgatory is.  Rabbi Yohanan said:  “The breadth of a wall,” but Rabbi Hanina said:  “The breadth of a hand.”[14]  This Midrash teaches us that heaven and hell are not two different locations.  The exact same set of circumstances can create either for us.  The only difference is our vision, our perspective.  The choice is ours whether we go through life seeing ugliness and banality, or whether we find the sacred.

 

Now the end of American Beauty is not a happy one for our friend Lester, as he tragically meets the end of his life.  Even so, he gives us eternal hope for a spiritual revival by saying this at the very end of the movie:   “That day, I realized that there was this entire life behind things.  And this incredibly benevolent force wanted to let me know there was no reason to be afraid, ever… And it helps me remember… there’s so much beauty, in the world.  Sometimes I feel like I can’t take it.  I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much.  My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst.  And then I remember to relax and stop trying to hold onto it.  And then it flows through me like rain.  And I cannot feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my life.”

 

Achen yesh Adonai bamakom hazeh.  God is in this place, and I truly hope we will all know it.

 

 

 

[1] Genesis 28:10-16.

 

[2] “A Concert Violinist at the Metro?” NPR, 4/11/07, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9521098. 

 

[3] Marder, Janet. “The Music All Around Us,” 9/18/09 http://www.betham.org/sermon/music-all-around-us.

 

[4] Stein, Joel. “Millenials:  the Me Me Me Generation,” Time Magazine. 5/9/13.

 

[5] Rottenberg, Dr. Jonathan. “The Depression Epidemic:  Old News, Mysteries and Bold Claims,” Psychology Today, 5/17/10 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/charting-the-depths/201005/the-depression-epidemic-old-news-mysteries-and-bold-claims.

 

[6] Menachot 43b.

 

[7] Mishnah B’rachot 6, 9.

 

[8] Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

 

[9] Ibid.

 

[10] Ecclesiastes 1:2.

 

[11] Zohar II:59a.

 

[12] Gen 3:9.

 

[13] Green, Arthur. Radical Judaism, 28.

 

[14] Pesikta Rabbatai 52:3.