Sermon: Yom Kippur 5778 – “Let’s all dip those headlights”
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 4 October 2017
We all know that you are far more likely to die in a road traffic accident than you are in a terrorist attack. Indeed, in Britain you are 150 times more in danger from anyone driving a car with no malicious intent at all, than you are from a terrorist, even in this awful past year of 5777 (Source: Office of National Statistics). Even so you are relatively safer from road traffic accidents in the United Kingdom than you are in many other countries.
Take the case of Kenya, where there are far fewer cars per 100 people than in the UK and where the population is similar to that of the UK at around 50 million. In Kenya twice as many people tragically die in a road traffic accident than in Britain. Why is this?
For reasons that are caused by the issues of a developing country such as dangerously pot-holed road surfaces, little street lighting being available and the vulnerability of pedestrians in these circumstances. But the reason why more than 3000 people die in road traffic accidents in Kenya each year, twice as many as in Britain, is also due to a breakdown in trust.
As Daniel Knowles, the Economist’s Africa correspondent describes it (1843 Magazine, May 2017, p27), “half of the time in Nairobi you cannot see the road ahead of you, because of the blinding dazzle of oncoming cars, all driving with their headlights, fog lights and any other lights they might have proudly on full beam. How does any reasonable driver react to this situation? Well if the reasonable driver is anything like me, he puts his headlights on full too…..Given that everyone else is behaving badly, you’re an idiot not to. Yet if everybody could resist the urge to behave selfishly, everybody would be better off. Hence the full-beam headlights. If most Kenyan drivers dipped their lights, everybody would be able to see [and everyone would be much safer] But nobody does it because nobody else does.”
Implied in this article is that unless pretty much everyone is responsible then no-one can be responsible. How do we free ourselves to be so? How can we be the person who drives on dipped headlights and saves life in the process?
We Jews have been doing this for nigh on three thousand years, if the Torah’s account is taken at face value, and certainly for two thousand years from the times of the Synagogue. We have been gathering together every year to say that we have done wrong due to choices that we have made and that we have the power to change our individual and group behaviour – that we are responsible.
According to Talmud Yoma on the conduct of the Day of Atonement in the Temple era (Yerushalmi 8b and Bavli 18a), every year the High Priest had to be given a refresher course in how to conduct the Yom Kippur sacrifices in the week before the day itself. Among the units of the course, so to speak, his fellow priests would march all the animals that were to be sacrificed in front of him so that he could identify them and know what to do with them. But they did not put any goats into that procession, even though one would be sacrificed and one sent to the wilderness as the original scapegoat (See Leviticus 16).
Why not? Because the goats represented the sins of each and every one of the people of Israel, whilst the other animals were sacrificed in those days to represent the sins of those he was properly responsible for, himself, his family and his fellow priests. The High Priest would feel terribly discouraged to feel responsible for all of us choice making human beings if he saw the two unfortunate goats that represent us.
The assumption implicitly behind the whole idea of Yom Kippur is that each one of us is responsible for our actions in the past year. Each of us is able to make choices, and we have failed in some of those choices. That is why we gather together to confess together out loud and individually during the quiet spaces the “sin we have committed against You”, whether it was what we did or failed to do to our fellow people or what we failed to do for God.
A sense of individual responsibility is immensely difficult in our time. For millennia philosophers have been asking the question of the extent to which every event or state of affairs, including every human decision and action, is the inevitable and necessary consequence of what has happened before. Are our choices not real choices but rather determined or caused – and thus not a responsibility for which we should feel responsible to change our way of behaviour? For Jewish philosophers such as Moses Maimonides the question could be put in theistic terms: “Does God know or does He not know that a certain individual will be good or bad? If you say ‘He knows’, then it necessarily follows that [that] man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand he would act, otherwise God’s knowledge would be imperfect.…” (The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics (Semonah Perakhim), ed. Joseph I. Gorfinkle, pp. 99–100. (New York: AMS Press), 1966.)
We know today that when we do something it happens due to explanations which seem anything but a free choice. As the neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky explains it in his book “Behave” (pp 6-7) published this year: To do anything we need our neurobiology to make it possible, the firing of neurons in particular parts of the brain. Then we can pull out the focus to a few seconds before when we can ask what sight, sound, or smell triggered the nervous system to produce that behaviour. We can ask of the hours or days earlier what hormones acted to change how responsive the individual was to the sensory stimuli. Then we can ask what features of the environment in the prior weeks to years changed the structure and function of that person’s brain and thus changed how it responded to those hormones and environmental stimuli. Then we can look back in the persons’ childhood, fetal environment, and genetic makeup. Even how the culture shaped the behaviour of people living in that individual’s group and the ecological factors shaping that culture – were the person’s ancestors nomads or city dwellers – until in the end the person is surely not responsible for their behaviour!
Robert Sapolsky suggests that maybe we sinners are not responsible at all for anything we did, as he puts it “free will is just biology we haven’t learned yet.”
But our Jewish religion, and everything that makes life livable, cannot imagine a word without free will and personal responsibility. Every stage of the sequence back to the behaviour, everything which can appear determined is subject to intervention, if we have the will to do so. That will is our soul, is what we address when each of us is called by our name – l’chol ish v isha yesh shem – as we began this service with the words of the Hebrew poet Zelda. The name that we were called when we entered the world, when we became responsible at bar and bat mitzvah age, the name which we used on our ketubot to enter into a covenant of potentially beautiful behaviour with our partner should we be blessed with one, and the name which will one day be used at the end of our lives when el-male rachamim, the memorial prayer is chanted including our name.
We cannot imagine a world without a strong measure of free will and Yom Kippur stands in certainty that it exists. Add up all of our biology and causes for our behaviour and yet we still have to push ourselves to choose to be an anti-Semite or a terrorist bringing misery or hate to the world. Add up all of our biology and causes for our behaviour and we still have to push ourselves to choose to act in sympathy with people who have lost their homes through fire, or flood or displacement due to war in their home country. We have to make the choice to be the one who drives on dipped headlights out of consideration or to dazzle others with our full beam so we can selfishly make progress.
This is what we doing here on this night and day of Yom Kippur and ultimately it is what we are doing by staying Jewish. We are trying to condition ourselves to make the right behavioral choices for a world we can share. Rabbi Hannah said on Rosh Hashanah evening that these days encourage us to be person centered, relational. They make us more than robots. Rabbi Josh said on Rosh Hashanah morning that these days challenge us to be creative in the light of today’s problems and challenges and not to feel determined to hold onto the solutions of the past unthinkingly. These days encourage us to talk ethics with our families, with our friends, to work with each other to think how that best way to behave would be for all of us and for each of us individually. These days give us a taste of what it can be to live in community today and all year long.
To quite an extent we are brought to be who we are by causes out of our control and by biological factors that go back well beyond the time of even our both. Yet the Jewish task is, and will always be to transcend this into free, good choices.
Once, when Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn’s Hasidim were seated together in all brotherliness, pipe in hand, Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn joined them. Because he was so friendly they asked him,
‘Tell us, dear rabbi, how should we serve God? How can be good?’
He was surprised at the question, and replied, ‘how should I know?’
But then the Rebbe went on to tell them this story. There were two friends of the king, and both were proved guilty of a crime.
Since he loved them the king wanted to show them mercy,
but he could not acquit them because even a king’s word
cannot prevail over the law.
So he gave this verdict: a rope was to be stretched over a deep chasm, and, one after another, the two were to walk across it.
Whoever reached to the other side was to be granted his life.
It was done as the king ordered, and the first of the friends got safely across.
The other, still standing on the same spot, cried to him, ‘tell me, friend, how did you manage to cross?’
The first called back, ‘I don’t know anything but this: whenever I felt myself toppling over to one side, I leaned to the other.’ (Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, Book 2, Page 59)
We live with what is given us by our world and by our biology – that is the tight rope. It is up to us how we balance upon it to make the progress we need to the other side. May this day and the thinking and talking it inspires help us learn how to balance better for the year ahead.