L'Shanah Tovah - Sermon by Rabbi Jonathan Blake, Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah 5771

TELL ME WHO YOU GO WITH AND IʼLL TELL YOU WHO YOU ARE

a sermon about cliques, mobs, and congregations

Rabbi Jonathan Blake

Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

Senior year, my high school presented Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. In retrospect, putting me in the title role seems an inspired bit of typecasting, but I assure you, at the time, Jewish leadership was the furthest thing from my mind. Before I became a rabbi, before I fell in love with a musical theatre performer, I was just a kid who felt at home on stage--a musical theatre nerd, it’s true.

As we prepared for the show, the dynamic among the brothers in the Joseph story played out in real life.

You know the story. Joseph comes from a big family, twelve brothers, and little Joe gets special treatment. He wears a fancy robe, a sign that Daddy loves him the most. As a result, he becomes a bit full of himself. He dreams about rising to power over his brothers and rubs it in their faces. One day they spot him and say, “Here comes the dreamer.” They hatch a plan: kill him. Then Reuben, the first-born, stands up and says, “No, don’t kill him! Just throw him in this pit while we come up with something less violent.” The brothers break for lunch. Afterwards Judah proposes selling Joseph into slavery. They drag him out of the pit, sell him to a hairy bunch of Ishmaelites, fake his death and split. Classy bunch of guys, these brothers.

So picture me, rehearsing for Joseph. As the weeks wore on, I found myself eating more and more meals by myself while the eleven brothers formed their own little group, hanging out and laughing it up, probably, I concluded, at my expense.

If you’ve ever been treated as an outsider by a clique, you’ve met Joseph’s brothers. If you’re the lone musical theatre nerd crossing the section of the lunchroom where the jocks eat, you’ve been Joseph. Better to stay in your own territory, with your own kind. Or avoid embarrassment and just eat quietly by yourself. “After all,” Joseph must have thought, hearing his brothers laughing over lunch ten feet away, “at least down here in the dark no one will bother me and I can dream my dreams in peace.”

I don’t need to hang out at Middle School or High School to see this scene played out week after week; I need only look around. Every Wednesday at 6:30, in a room of 200 teens eating pizza, somehow one table seems always to have one kid, maybe two, eating alone. It’s that deep, dark pit right in the middle of the room. More will roll in at 7:00 just in time for class, in order to avoid the “Social Hall” which to them must seem anything but. In a B’nei Mitzvah class of 100 students, somehow a few will go through all of seventh and eighth grades without a single invitation to a classmate’s party. And I will tell you straight up that some of our best and brightest students, who are thoughtful and kind on their own, nevertheless fail, in a group setting, to remember the vulnerable kids. And some of our best and brightest, thoughtful and kind on their own, become downright mean in their cliques.

Cliques, starting as early as fourth or fifth grade, demand conformity and suppress individuality. Wearing the same clothes, using the same language, listening to the same music, all provide a sense of safety in numbers. Much better to be a brother than to be Joseph, with his special talent and his flamboyant outfit.

Psychologist Michael Thompson, who has written about grade-school cliques, observes that “the message of the group is this: You have to look and act this way or else we’ll reject you.

And we might reject you even if you do it right.... [D]efining other people as ‘different’ or ‘not like us’ helps their own group cohere. That’s why friendship groups turn into cliques, and why cliques can be mean.”

Even the kids with a conscience have a hard time standing up to the clique. That’s why Reuben and Judah failed. They wanted to rescue Joseph but they couldn’t look like losers in front of their brothers. They made a choice: not to do follow their conscience, but to follow the crowd.

“Tell me who you go with, and I’ll tell you who you are.” I first heard this proverb spoken by Jeanette Eichenwald, the educator at my temple growing up. The daughter of survivors, Jeanette taught us about the Holocaust. Asked to explain how countless ordinary folks from Germany and Poland and all over Europe could have stood by, even assisted the Nazis, in the deportation and killing of six million of our people, she would say: “Tell me who you go with and I’ll tell you who you are.” We become like the people with whom we associate. And human beings acting as a mob can do the unthinkable.

The Torah tells us that when Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive the Commandments, the people grew impatient. “Vayikahel ha-am”-- “and the people assembled themselves.” In

other words, they became a mob. Imagine countless ordinary folks all of a sudden willing to do violence. So assembled, they intimidated Aaron into making an idol. Aaron caved and fashioned a golden calf. When Moses returned, “the people were out of control.” Surely some were individuals of conscience. But in the crowd they surrendered their will to speak up. “Tell me who you go with and I’ll tell you who you are.”

On Thursday, August 7, 2003, five hundred people converged on the Fifth Avenue Toys-R-Us Store. Directed by an e-mail from a man calling himself “Bill,” they spontaneously began to bow down before the life-sized animatronic T-Rex in the middle of the store. Before security could figure out what on earth was happening, they vanished. The participants in this social experiment known as a “Flash Mob” had never before met.

“Bill” happens to be my college friend Bill Wasik, a journalist who has parlayed his little stunt into a nifty career studying mob behavior by creating mischievous “social experiments.” Flash Mobs have taken on a life of their own, with spontaneous gatherings popping up all over the world. Hundreds of people arrive at exactly the same time, do something totally random--like ride the subway in their underwear or perform a synchronized swimming routine in a public fountain--and then scatter. With his invention, Bill demonstrated that a mob takes on a life of its own--mindlessly following orders to do something completely meaningless. Individuals lose themselves in a mob. Whether goose-stepping in tandem at a Nazi rally; or trampling innocent spectators at soccer stadiums; or bowing down before a giant plastic dinosaur, or a golden calf, the common thread is a basic human craving to go with the crowd. The mob itself becomes the attraction.

Now if at this juncture you think that you have figured out

my message--beware of the crowd; watch out for the influence of the bad guys; and be a better, more upstanding person--you are only partially correct. If that were all I wanted to say, I could myself “cave to the will of the crowd” and simply stop here.

But there’s one final thing we need to address tonight. For if the best way to live a good and meaningful life meant that each of us should go it alone, then we’d have no reason ever to join a congregation--no reason to be here.

You have chosen to become part not of a clique or, God forbid, a mob, but a congregation, to join yourself and your family to the mission of Westchester Reform Temple and the Jewish People. And that choice says a lot about you.

I meet a lot of people--congregants and non-congregants alike--with a lot of baggage about congregations. “Rabbi,” they say, “I’m all for spirituality but I dislike organized religion.” I understand what motivates them. With a huge majority of the ugliest behavior coming from a tiny minority of synagogues, churches, and mosques, it’s easy to conclude that “organized religion” deserves the blame.

And yet--mixed feelings or not--here you are.

Tell me who you go with and I’ll tell you who you are.

You have chosen to go with a congregation.

And yet... we hardly know one another!

Here, in a congregation of 1,200 households, a family can still end up sitting alone at a fifth grade dinner or the sixth grade retreat. It is true, our greeters embody the Bible’s teachings about hospitality and love of neighbor. And yet somehow more than a handful of worshippers will leave any Shabbat Service without having been welcomed by anyone but

our greeters. So two new rules for the new year.

One. No one sits alone at a temple function--a dinner, a service, a special event. Ever.

Rule number two. No one leaves tonight without meeting the people in your row. And the row in front of you. And behind you. Maybe we could do one better than Congress and even shake hands with someone across the aisle.

When you joined WRT, knowingly or not, you chose to become part of a covenant which is a fancy word for a contract. A covenant turns a mob--an ordinary group of people--into a

congregation. A mob bands together for no good purpose; a congregation bands together to multiply the good that any one of us could do alone.

Alone you can read a book; as a congregation you can study Torah. Alone you can write a check to tzedakah; as a congregation you can create a fund that lets everyone contribute. Alone you can visit Israel; as a congregation you can travel together to present a Torah scroll to a grateful congregation in need. Alone you can whisper a prayer to God; as a congregation you can sing in harmony. Alone you can feed a table of hungry people; as a congregation you can stock the county’s Food Bank.

When you joined WRT, knowingly or not, you chose to go with a community of people who share our core values. You did not choose to go it alone. Knowingly or not, you chose to experience the most important moments of your lives not alone but together.

And yet many of us still view those important moments as private life-cycle events--bris and baby naming, Bar and Bat Mitzvah, wedding and funeral. In a congregation that necessitates pairing most students for B’nei Mitzvah, still far too many families sharing a date interact only at the Sixth Grade Retreat and not again until the week of the celebration. Some of us may chafe at the way in which WRT cares about how we celebrate Bar/Bat Mitzvah: that we insist on a dress code, urge tzedakah, require mitzvah projects and disapprove of socially exclusionary party favors like personalized sweatshirts. But, you know what? That’s what it means to be part of a congregation.

Tell me who you go with, and I’ll tell you who you are. You chose WRT to be your congregation. In Hebrew we call a congregation a kehillah. It is almost exactly like the word kahal which can refer to any large assembly of people including a mob. But the word kehillah adds two little letters, a yud and a hei, which spell out Yah, one of God’s many names. A congregation is what you get when you take a regular group of people, a kahal, and add God, add Yah. You get a kehillah -- a sacred community.

The Jewish People experiences its transformative moments in community. When the Israelites crossed the sea to freedom, Miriam took up her tambourine and all the women began to dance. After all, friends, you can’t dance the horah alone.

Some of us have had a year filled with joy. Children have stood at the chuppah, ascended the bimah as Bar and Bat Mitzvah, graduated from school. Parents have celebrated milestone birthdays and anniversaries, careers found new life and possibility. We come here tonight because we can’t dance the horah alone.

Others have had a year filled with tears. Loved ones have taken sick, or died, or moved away. Friendships have been tested, marriages strained or severed. Work has been frustrating and a good job hard to find. Children have endured untold private pain. People we care about have let us down. But we come here tonight because we don’t want to cry alone.

The rest us have had a mix of it all, ups and downs and in- betweens, and we need to share it, because only together, only in this place, does it all fit. We are here for a reason, and, by God, we need one another to make sense of our individual lives. We need one another, if only to remind ourselves that--whether life hands us joy or sorrow or all the mess in between--we can’t go it alone.