Did We Help Kill Ari Fuld?

Kol Yisrael Aravim Zeh Bazeh: All Israel Is Responsible for One Another

It used to be that the hardest thing to say was, “I’m sorry.” That’s apparently not the case anymore, since now we are all perfect we have nothing to be sorry about. Our new self-proclaimed perfection accompanied by its dastardly cohort, pride, now makes “I need you” and “Can you help me?” the hardest things to say.  After all, we are the smarter one, the better one, the more deserving one, and since God mistakenly gave you what he should have really given me, I say, “Keep your favors; keep your advice; keep your money; keep your opinion.”  And furthermore, “You may think you’re great and perfect, but it's not true, because really, I am.”  

And that is why my beloved Jews, we will continue to cry and suffer as a Jewish nation: because we don’t know how to be brothers and sisters, friends and cousins, neighbors and fellow citizens. We begrudge seeing the value in the other, and as such we don’t know how to be mensches. When the ancient Israelites were counted in a national census they were tabulated by half shekels, not whole ones. One reason it was performed as such was to emphasize that we each are just fragments of a whole, single letters in a holy Torah that only have purpose and meaning when united.

When we come to the humbling realization that we do need each other and that you have something that makes me complete and I have something that makes you better-- all so by God’s design--then and only then can we begin to be sorry and hopefully embarrassed for thinking we are perfect. Only then, when there is humility and love and regard for others, can God’s blessings be upon us.

The English poet John Donne wrote in the 1600s that “no man is an island” and we’ve oft repeated it, after all, it sounds poetic and not “too Jewish.” However, over a thousand years before Donne’s popular phrase was inked, the Talmud told us that “all Jews are responsible for one another”—we simply can’t go it alone.  Yet that Jewish obligation is not only relegated to tangible responsibilities, i.e., giving charity, offering a helping hand, it is true on a spiritual level as well. When one Jew sins, he or she not only affects his or her own fate, but that of every other Jew. In fact, when a Jew sins he or she brings down the entire creation. Okay, so here’s where you get turned off, right? Sounds too rabbinical and slightly too esoteric. Yet funny how even though there are few lepidopterists among us, no one ever dismisses the Butterfly Effect: the posit that the gentle flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world will precipitate a tornado in another part. Be on storm watch my beloved people, for if you flutter in the gutter, God will clip the wings of your fellow Jews and, as a result, we will all come crashing down. A nation meant to soar, will plummet.

The Talmud teaches that we are so connected as a people that the righteous among us suffer as atonement for the sins of his generation. And then Ari Fuld was murdered by an Arab terrorist. Yes, the killer perpetrated the lethal wound, but from all the reviews I’ve read, which echo my own heart-piercing emotions, Ari was a saint, a hero, a lion of Zion, a modern-day David and a national hero of the likes of Yonni Netanyahu. And yet, probably like me, most of you knew him only through social media and like me, you probably wept upon hearing the news as if he was your brother, your son, your friend. Then you searched online for hours seeking answers and also for ways to help. Why? Because all of Am Israel is ONE. Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk said, “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” Once again as a people we became whole with one broken heart. Is this what it takes, again, to unite us? If it is, please don’t tell God and give Him any more ideas.

In Ari Fuld’s last live talk on the weekly parasha, less than 48 hours before he was murdered, he said that a leader is only as good as his followers.  What does that make him? What does that make us?

His mind boggling fame around the world, the love he garnered which was more than he or we realized and also the time he was taken from us, in the shadow of Yom Kippur, compels us to ask ourselves a million questions and one among them must be, “What have we done wrong as a people that Ari Fuld is dead?” Many blame the terrorist; I do too. But the blame can’t begin and end there. If he was as righteous as we say he was-- and I believe he was-- then we must ask that very hard follow-up question. Did he die for our sins? I know in my heart losing him sure feels like a punishment.

“The righteous man has perished, but no one takes it to heart, and men of kindness are taken away, with no one understanding that because of the evil the righteous man has been taken away.” (Isaiah 57:1)

My fellow Jews, each year after we finish fasting and praying, we tend to return to our old ways. Don’t be so selfish. Realize we need each other. We hold each other's lives in our hands. Try just a little harder to add a new mitzvah to your life, whether it is Shabbat candles, or saying a prayer before you eat or after. Don't just be a "cardiac Jew," a Jew at heart, be a Jew in your words and in your deeds. And don't turn your back on my problems just because you have your own. 

Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, Israel’s former Chief Rabbi and a Holocaust survivor, reminds us in his autobiography that the German’s motto for their death camp, Buchenwald, was Jedem das seine--each man to his fate! That is the Nazi's way; it is not the Jewish way—our God is one, our land is one, our Torah is one and our fate is one! Don’t be so perfect. I need you. You need me. Our lives depend on it.

Just Five More Minutes (and then Life Passed Me By!)

It was impossible to make it to the gym at 6 a.m. this morning because I only woke up at 7. And I asked myself, "Is this going to be another year like that? You know the kind! The one where a better version of you is thriving in your heart and mind, but in real-time the snooze button is getting more traction than the treadmill.

In a few days we will all hear another kind of wake-up call, and it will emanate from the shofar, the ram’s horn meant to serve our soul like a well-intentioned alarm clock, and shake it from its slumber. So many times I've heard the sounds from that instrument, sometimes in mighty blasts and sometimes petering out because the blower ran out of steam. In either case its holy sounds invigorate my best intentions and make me want to run a spiritual marathon and do everything "right" in the year ahead. I doubt there is a single person who exits the synagogue at the end of the holidays that doesn't strive to be better and want more for himself in the year set to unfold.

But we are doomed to conk out in the first mile for one simple reason: we are still dragging along all our old habits, insecurities and excuses of years gone by which surely muffle the beckoning call of the finish line. So perhaps the better question is not, "Is this going to be another year like THAT?" but rather are YOU going to be like THAT again this year? (Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting a different result.)

It's funny how we all get so incensed when politicians tell us what we want to hear, but the truth is we lie to ourselves and pander to ourselves more than anyone else. We manufacture excuses for ourselves with great agility as to why we didn't, why we shouldn't, why we can't. So I'm here to tell you something you have never heard before: Yes we can! God has put into us everything we need to succeed. All we have to do is stop hitting the snooze button and coddling ourselves in fake comfort zones while bemoaning how bad our lot is.

Before turning to heaven in the coming year and asking "God where are You?" Ask yourself "Where are YOU? Is your head in the refrigerator while you're praying to be skinny? Are you sleeping at noon while you're praying to be successful? Are you hiding in your house while praying to meet the man of your dreams? Are you screaming at your spouse while praying for a better marriage? Are you gossiping about people while praying to be a better person?

I like to imagine that the New Year is a vicious and scrupulous customs officer, so before I get "on board" it's best to clean out my baggage and leave the garbage behind.

Friends, here's your declaration card-- what are you bringing into the New Year?

And here I conclude with a prayer that we will all be inscribed in the Book of Life and that the echoes of the shofar will resonate all year long in our hearts and minds so that our feet will stay in lockstep with our best intentions and deliver them to the finish line. Shana Tova!