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Rabbi Karp's Sermons ... YOM KIPPUR EVE Two
tourists were driving through Louisiana.
As they approached Natchitoches, they started arguing about the
pronunciation of the name of the town.
They argued back and forth until they stopped for lunch.
As they stood at the counter, one of the tourists asked the
employee, “Before we order, could you please settle an argument for us?
Would you please pronounce where we are... very slowly?”
The cashier leaned over the counter and said, “Burrrrrr,gerrrrrr
Kiiinnnggg.” A
true story from Colorado Springs:
A guy walked into a corner store with a shotgun and demanded all
the cash from the cash drawer.
After the cashier put the cash in a bag, the robber saw a bottle of
scotch that he wanted behind the counter on a shelf.
He told the cashier to put it in the bag as well, but the cashier
refused, saying, “I don’t believe you are over 21.”
The robber said he was, but the clerk still refused to give it to
him without proof of age.
At that point, the frustrated robber took his driver’s license
out of his wallet and gave it to the clerk.
The clerk looked it over, and agreed that the man was in fact over
21, and so he put the scotch in the bag.
The robber ran from the store with his loot.
The cashier promptly called the police and gave them the name and
address of the robber, which he got off the license.
They arrested the robber two hours later. A
funeral service was being held in a church for a woman who just passed
away. At
the end of the service, the pall bearers were carrying the casket out of
the sanctuary when they accidentally bumped into a wall, jarring the
casket. They
heard a faint moan from inside.
They opened the casket and found that the woman was actually still
alive. She
lived for ten more years, and then died.
A ceremony was again held in the same church, and at the end of the
ceremony, the pall bearers were again carrying out the casket.
As they were walking out, the husband suddenly jumped up and cried
out, “WATCH OUT FOR THE WALL!” I
know that jokes are a strange way to begin a Kol Nidre Eve sermon, but
there is a point to them.
Do you know what these three jokes have in common?
Each of them were emailed to me. When
you think about it, email humor is quite a strange phenomenon.
In fact, there are certain aspects to email humor, and what happens
to it, that are deeply disturbing.
Let me explain. Why
do people tell other people jokes?
To make them laugh.
To make them feel good.
Indeed, the telling of a joke is a very special gift.
It is the gift of happiness.
It is a warm and wonderful way to let people know that you care
about them and about their well being. Now
along comes the internet, and we find that we have this marvelous tool at
our disposal.
We can communicate with so many people, and so many people can
communicate with us, expending but a fraction of the effort needed before.
Then somebody emails us a joke, and we laugh and enjoy it and we
decide to share it with some of our friends.
It is our way of saying, “I want to make your day a little
brighter, a little happier.
I want to add to the quality of your life.” But
before we know it, we are getting 30, 40, or more pieces of email a day,
and included in them are a ton of jokes.
We are overwhelmed.
We cannot read them all.
Believe me, I know, for I save all the jokes I receive, and right
now in my computer I have almost 1,100 of them, not counting the
duplicates!
So what do we do?
We start deleting.
Without even reading, we are deleting.
And not only are we deleting, but we are resenting.
We are resenting receiving this “spam,” this electronic junk
mail. Indeed,
when you think about it, this is very disturbing.
After all, someone cared enough about us to reach out to us and
attempt to bring a little merriment into our day.
They are trying to give us a little gift.
And what do we do to this person?
We delete them!
We don’t even open their gift.
We just toss it away.
And even worse, some of us might say something to them, like,
“Gee! Do
you ever get any work done, or do you spend your whole day on the
computer, sending out jokes?”
We complain to them instead of thanking them. What
began as a caring act ends up as some sort of heartless rejection.
Something here has seriously gone awry. This
situation with email humor is merely symptomatic of a greater challenge
which we face.
It is a life challenge.
It is an ethical challenge.
It is the challenge of the power and the potential of technology. Many
of us here remember a time when the pundits professed that technology was
good, indeed great.
It was good, it was great, because it held out a promise of a
future in which so many burdens would be lifted from our shoulders by its
advances.
The promise of technology was a promise of more time and more
leisure in our lives.
Technology would relieve us of so many mundane tasks, and make the
completion of so many other tasks so much simpler and quicker.
It would liberate us to spend far more time with the people we
love, enjoying the quality of our lives.
I remember going to the 1964 World’s Fair, and there, thoroughly
enjoying the General Electric exhibit, which was a cutting edge robotic
display called the “Carousel of Progress.” This exhibit utilized a
series of scenes to take us from the lifestyle of the average family at
the turn of the century to the projected wondrous lifestyle of families in
the future.
I can still clearly recall the music which accompanied this ride -
“It’s a great big beautiful tomorrow!”
Even today, on some of the nostalgia channels of cable TV, every
once in a while you can catch a Movietone newsreel dedicated to the
promise of a better future through technology. Indeed,
technological advances have taken us a great distance from the 60's and
before. But
has technology fulfilled its promise of giving us more time, more leisure;
of a higher quality of life for us?
Or has it actually increased the demands placed upon our time and
our lives? As
we enter the 21st century, we find ourselves at a very
dangerous crossroads.
What we have been able to accomplish through our advances in
technology has been wondrous.
Indeed, it seems limitless.
And it all is going so fast.
When I moved to this community, a little over 15 years ago, coming
from Silicon Valley, I brought with me a personal computer, an Apple 2+.
It was cutting edge, and so was I.
I even made the cover of the “Gold Book,” or I should say, my
computer and I made the cover, for I may have been the first clergyperson
in the Quad Cities to make use of computer technology.
That computer still sits in my office, with its 64K - 64,000 bytes
- of memory.
Today, as I work on a computer, which is already outdated, with an
8.4 gigabyte memory hard drive, that old Apple is nothing more than a boat
anchor. But
with all our technological advances, it seems that instead of liberating
us, these advances only raise the bar for us.
They make us that much more capable of being more productive.
Therefore, greater productivity is expected of us. Unfortunately,
while the potential capabilities of technology seem limitless, the same
cannot be said for human capabilities.
For we are, by our very nature, limited creatures.
We can only do so much.
We can only operate so fast.
There is a certain speed beyond which our fingers cannot move
across the keyboard.
And if we are already into voice activated software, still our
mouths can only produce so many words per minute.
It matters not how much faster the computer can process them.
As human beings, we still have only 60 seconds to a minute, 60
minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day, 7 days to a week, and our bodies
still need to break for nourishment and sleep, not to mention recreation. But
the gods of technology are productivity and speed.
They are demanding gods.
They are unforgiving gods.
They have promised us leisure, but what they have given us -
indeed, what they have demanded of us - is something far different;
something antithetical to leisure - instantaneous accessibility. Thanks
to technology, no longer can we leave the office.
9 to 5 is a memory, perhaps a fantasy.
How many of you are here tonight with a cell phone in your pocket?
You know who you are!
It used to be pagers, but pagers aren’t good enough any more,
because you have to get the message, find a phone and call back, and that
takes too much time. Privacy,
that’s a memory also.
We have no time left to ourselves - to be alone, when we cannot be
reached.
We have phones in our pockets.
We have phones in our cars.
We carry palm pilots.
Our laptop computers go with us wherever our desktop computers
cannot. I
admit it.
I am as guilty as the rest of you.
When I am home alone, and I have to go to the bathroom, do you know
what I do?
I take the cordless phone in there with me, just so that I won’t
miss a phone call.
There is something sick about that.
When did it become a sin to have to call someone back? The
fax machine.
Another mixed blessing.
Sure, it is wonderful to receive documents within minutes, if that
long. But
it, too, robs us of precious time.
Before there were faxes, if you had a document that you wanted
someone to consider and comment on, you called them up, you discussed it
with them, and then you stuck it in an envelope and sent it to them in the
mail. They
waited a day, or a few days, before they received it, and in that time,
they had the important opportunity to think about what you discussed and
what was coming to them.
They had the leisure to consider before acting.
By the time they received the document, they could act upon it
thoughtfully.
If they had revisions or insights, they could call you, share them
with you, then stick the revised document back in the mail, and the
process would repeat itself.
But not today.
That’s not good enough.
It is too slow.
In fact, what do we call postal mail?
Snail mail.
Today we fax it to you, on the spot.
You have to consider it and act upon it, on the spot, and respond,
on the spot.
What once may have taken a week, now is done in a matter of hours
or less.
That gives us the opportunity to do so many more things; everything
but act thoughtfully. Let’s
face it.
Our technology has exceeded us.
It has enabled us - no, more than enabled us, demanded of us - to
act quicker and more efficiently than we are humanly, physically capable
of. In
order to meet its demands, we wind up having to invest more of ourselves,
more of our energy and more of our time, than we ever had to before.
But our energy and our time are finite commodities.
By nature, they are very limited.
Therefore, in order to meet these demands, the supply of our time,
the supply of our energy, has to come from somewhere.
From whence does it come?
From the rest of our lives.
From that part of our lives that we had erroneously hoped would be
expanded through technology.
That time and that energy which we otherwise would be spending on
ourselves and our families and our friends.
That time and that energy which we otherwise would be using for
that all important human process of self renewal, recreation.
“Recreation,” an important word, a very important word.
However, we have forgotten how to say it properly.
We should say it as it is written - “re-creation” - creating
ourselves anew.
How often do we have the opportunity to do that anymore? What
a serious and tragic drain that is upon us.
Who here has not been at some activity with their children or on an
outing with their family and has not encountered someone wrapped around a
cell phone, conducting business?
Perhaps that someone was you or someone you love.
Who here has been out to eat in a restaurant and has never heard
the ring of a cell phone?
It has gotten so bad that there are certain restaurants that
prohibit cell phones.
Who here, other than retirees, can honestly claim that their social
life - the time they spend with friends purely for purposes of pleasure -
has increased over the last several years?
When I was a child, my parents got together with their friends
regularly, at least once a week.
And that was typical.
Today, for many of us, literally months could pass between such
purely social get togethers. Yes,
we stand at a very important and dangerous crossroads.
For our technology is demanding more and more of us; increasingly
more than we are capable of giving.
And as we stand at these crossroads, we have to begin to ask of
ourselves, “Because our technology makes it possible for us to do
something, does it mean that we have to do it?”
Because we can do it, does it mean we should do it? Technology
has truly thrust us into an undiscovered country.
Perhaps this challenge was never made clearer than on the day when
scientists announced the existence of a little lamb named Dolly.
Dolly, the little lamb that was cloned.
Cloning technology, with its many and varied implications, is
within our grasp.
But we are left with the question, “Because we are capable of
cloning, should we clone?”
Should we cross that line between God and man as Creator?
Physically, we can do that.
But what about ethically?
What would we be doing to the very nature of the human condition,
if we could and did engineer human beings at will, for our own purposes;
purposes such as the harvesting of organs for transplants?
Because we can do it, does not necessarily mean that we should do
it. Our
technology has exceeded us. The
ethical question of cloning is not just about cloning.
It is about how we choose to deal with the role and place of
technology in our lives.
And for us as Jews, there is no better time to confront this
question than on Yom Kippur.
For Yom Kippur is a holy day wholly dedicated to the question of
how do we best live our lives. On
Yom Kippur, we are instructed to fast; to refrain from eating and drinking
for 24 hours.
There are many good reasons given to us by our tradition as to why
we should fast.
One of them speaks most directly to this question of technology. One
of the reasons why we fast is as a matter of self discipline.
So much of our lives are controlled by the demands of our bodies.
Our physical drives scream at us constantly, “Satisfy me!
Satisfy me!
Satisfy me!”
It is so easy for us to surrender to them, permitting them to
control our lives; to make of our lives a pursuit of their satisfaction.
But on Yom Kippur we fast, and by fasting we say to our bodies and
to our physical drives, “Not today.
I put you on hold.
I will be in control of my life, and not you!” The
question of fasting is the question of who controls our lives.
The answer of fasting is that we must take control of our lives.
We must muster the power, the will and the strength of character to
sometimes say “No!”
Our lives are our responsibilities.
They are too important to surrender to forces other than our moral
consciences. What
holds true for how we need to deal with our physical appetites likewise
holds true for how we need to deal with the baying hounds of technology.
We need to control the technology and not permit the technology to
rule our lives.
We need to be ever mindful of the fact that technology is there to
serve us, not to dominate us. When
we surrender our lives to technology, we are surrendering our humanity,
for our human standards are quickly replaced by the techno standards of
efficiency and productivity.
And while efficiency and productivity are important, they are not
everything.
Far, far from it.
They are the sideshow.
Our humanity must always be the center stage.
That is something that we can ill afford to forget.
But at the same time that is something that our technology, if
allowed to rule the roost, encourages us to forget.
That is why it is so easy for us to delete that joke unread from
our email; because with our focus on the technological aspects of that
email, we can easily forget the very human motivations behind it.
That email comes to represent nothing more than wasted space on the
hard drive, rather than the caring person who sent it.
And we cannot let that happen to us.
We cannot permit technology to desensitize us to our fellow human
beings. Nor
can we let technology distract us from the far more important experience
of actual human contact.
Cyber talk is nice, and it is convenient, but real talk -
conversation face-to-face - is far superior.
We have to re-learn for ourselves how to choose people over
machines.
When we are with family and with friends, we have to learn how to
really be there with them.
We have to learn how to turn off those darn cell phones and
proclaim to the world of our work, there are times when I am just not
available for you.
There are times when we come home when we really need to be home;
when we should not be turning on that computer in the basement or in the
study or wherever we keep it, in order to get some more work done.
And there are times when we go on a vacation when we have to leave
that laptop home.
The world will just have to do without us for a few days, for there
are others who need us more.
Indeed, we need ourselves more. Let
me close with one more cyber joke. One
day Mr. Goldberg called his Rabbi and said, “I know tonight is Kol Nidre,
but tonight the Mets start in the playoffs.
Rabbi, I’m a lifelong Mets fan.
I simply have to watch the Mets game on TV.”
The Rabbi responded, “Mr. Goldberg, that’s what VCRs are
for.” Goldberg,
surprised, turned to the Rabbi and said, “You mean I can tape Kol Nidre?” My
friends, technology is there to serve us, and it can, if we know how to
use it properly, serve us very well, but it is all in the choices we make. AMEN |
