An old man lay dying. When all his children gathered for the last farewell, he looked at them and asked, “Is everyone here?” They nodded. With a troubled look, he asked: “So who is taking care of the store?” We are experiencing the final gasp of this year, the last few days before the old year gives way to the new. Some of our people, to be sure, are involved in their usual pursuits, unaffected by the spiritual message of this season. But most Jews are fortunately aware. If not tonight, then in a few days the synagogues will be filled with people, and we shall see the sight which Moses beheld when he spoke the words with which the Torah reading of this morning began: “You stand this day, all of you, before the Lord your God — your leaders, the heads of your tribes, your elders and your officers, all the men of Israel; your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from the woodchopper to the waterdrawer.” (Deut. 29:9-10).
Now let us not assume naively that those who come to the synagogue on the High Holy Days all come with the same commitments. Some come to search their souls and do teshuvah; others to pray for the strength to live better Jewish lives in the coming year; still others simply to attend services and thereby identify with their people. Some just come to see and be seen. Many who come to the synagogue on the High Holy Days are only part Jews with only partial commitments, and, what is worse, they are not even committed to the same “parts”. We all play a variety of roles in the drama — and drudgeiy — of our daily lives. We are simultaneously, and yet separately, husbands or wives, fathers or mothers, businessmen or professionals or housewives, Americans and Jews. We are all of these at once and yet only one of them at a time. How easy it is for the business man to be just that, a businessman, interested only in the cold figures of profit or loss, and postpone if not forget the warmth and tenderness of a husband or father? How easy it is to compart mentalize our personalities, to turn ourselves on and turn our selves off! Thus, we may be concerned about civil rights but not the synagogue, about Vietnam but not Yeshivos and Talmud Torahs, about the increasing secularization and acculturation of Jewish life but not the social problems of American society. We may have become much more efficient by focusing solely upon the immediate proiblem without concern for our other roles. What we may gain in efficiency, is more than lost in forgotten roles that are ignored. This is the great tragedy of Jewish life today.
Historically, we have long been annoyed by the contradictions and conflicts of living as Jews in a non-Jewish society. We compartmentalize ourselves, not because we want to, but because we have to. Over the course of time we have solved our problem in one of several ways. The Haskalah said to the Jew: “Be a Jew in your home and a man outside." Today many have adopted the opposite attitude: They are “public” Jews, by identity alone, and not in terms of the demands and rewards of Jewish living. Traditionally, however, the Jew was, as he must be again, an Ish Yisrael, which Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch translated so aptly, a “Yisroel Mensch,” a completely integrated Jew with countless privileges and responsibilities. I pray that we will discover them in the days to come, to enable us to become more effective individuals in all our roles.
A young boy playing with a jigsaw puzzle map of the world was having difficulty because of his limited knowledge of geography. His father, looking on, made no attempt to interfere. A few moments later the boy rushed to his father with the proud announce ment that all the pieces were in place. The father, pleased by the boy’s sudden success, asked: “How did you do it, son?” “It was easy. Dad,” came the reply. “I saw that there was a picture of a man on the other side of the map-puzzle. When I put the man together, the world fell into place.”
This is our task during the High Holiday season — to put man back together — in aJl his roles. A better world must follow.
