Greatness in Small Things * Rosh HaShanah 5780

Rabbi Joel M. Levenson, DMin

“From a distance, the world seems like a big, bad, scary place. If you listen to the news, or even ask the person next to you, they will likely talk about war, poverty, corruption, and hate. And they are right, from a distance. But I believe that up close there is enough good, enough love, and enough pure kindness to make the world go round.”

These are the words that open each episode of The Kindness Diaries, a series on Netflix that chronicles a man’s trip around the world — a trip about kindness, generosity, and the human spirit, and he meets people doing small, but great things.

In a world where so much is out of our control – how does doing one small thing make a big impact? 

Today I want to talk about how to appreciate the greatness in small things.

Today I want to consider the heroism of ordinary people trying to do what life demands of them in a world that doesn’t always make it easy, sometimes almost impossible, but never failing to make the effort, achieving greatness by doing small things.

Ordinary people showing extraordinary courage, extraordinary devotion, extraordinary generosity, extraordinary willingness to forgive.  

I believe that it is in these moments we can see the face of God.

I believe in God, not because of philosophical arguments.

I believe in God because I am constantly seeing people asked to do things that they fear are too hard for them to do, asked to come up with qualities of soul that they are not sure they possess.  

And from some source beyond themselves, in a way they will never be able to understand or explain, they do it. 

They persevere. 

You have taught me that.  

I’ve seen you asked to deal with illness, your own or that of someone you love.

I’ve seen you compelled to deal with loss, -- bereavement, betrayal, diminished income. You said to me, “I don’t know if I can handle this,” and I said to you, “You have a choice here.”

And you tried because you really believed you had no other choice, and you found out that you could do more than you ever thought you could.

Greatness in small things, ordinary people doing difficult things that the moment demands of us, showing a depth of character one might not have expected they were capable of.  

I want to focus this morning on one biblical character who exemplifies that miraculous quality, the ability of an ordinary person to do great things in small ways.

It’s hard to imagine a major biblical figure remaining nearly anonymous, to the point where we don’t really know much about him, but that seems to be the case with the person I have in mind.  

He is the central character of our Rosh HaShanah Torah readings, yet nobody ever talks about him.

I’m speaking of Abraham’s son Isaac.  

This morning’s reading was all about his birth, but the Torah narrative keeps talking about everybody else except him.  It keeps talking about Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael. 

Tomorrow’s reading is about how he almost got killed.  The story is referred to as Akedat Yitzhak, the Binding and Near Sacrifice of Isaac, but when we talk about the story, we never talk about Isaac.

We talk about Abraham, should he have obeyed God’s command?   Should he have protested?  

We talk about God, how could God have demanded such a thing?  

Or maybe we talk about Sarah, how did she respond when she found about it?  

The one person we never talk about is the person whose life was at stake, Isaac the anonymous patriarch. 

When it’s time for him to get married, he doesn’t take a wife for himself the way every other man in the Bible does.  His father finds him a wife.  

In the space of just a few verses, he goes from being the son of Abraham to being the father of Jacob and Esau, with hardly a thought given to who he is. 

And yet, Isaac does some remarkable things, things in which he can be more of a role model for us than either his father Abraham or his son Jacob.

Rabbi Harold Kushner points out that there are at least three occasions in his life when he shows greatness in small things.  

The first has to do with laughter, making someone laugh.

The second has to do with forgiveness, forgiving his father for a mistake.

The third has to do with forgiving his children when they disappointed him.

The first case.  There is a verse in the Torah, at a time when Isaac and his wife Rebecca are house guests of the king of Gerar.  At one point, the king looks out the window V’hinei Yitzhak M’tahek et Rivka (Gen. 26:8).  

Now that verse is subject to a number of interpretations, but the simplest, most literal translation is “he saw Isaac making his wife Rebecca laugh.” 

Nobody else in the Bible does that.

There is nowhere else in the Bible where somebody tries to make somebody else feel good by making them laugh.  

Obviously we can’t tell at a distance of four thousand years what they were laughing about, whether they were sharing something funny or whether she was feeling sad and he was trying to cheer her up.  

There is not a whole lot of laughter in the Bible, and when it’s there, it is usually mocking laughter.  

But Isaac seems to care about how Rebecca feels.

Let me tell you from personal experience – if your spouse is upset or sad or frustrated, and you can find a way to her laugh, it’s priceless. 

Isaac is that rare person who appreciates the holiness of laughter,

its healing quality, its ability to connect people who had been separate until then.

And that’s not the only place.   Infertility is an ongoing theme in these patriarchal narratives.   

Every one of the patriarchal generations had to contend with it, but listen to what happens when Isaac and Rebecca find themselves childless. Vaye'etar  Yitzhak LaAdonai L’Nochach ishto ki akarah hi (Gen. 25:21), “Rebecca was childless and Isaac (without being asked) prayed for her, and she conceived.”  

That’s Isaac, the anonymous patriarch, the one nobody talks about, the one nobody gives sermons about, but he was the man who cared about making his wife laugh, he was the man who really listened to his wife and heard even the words she wasn’t speaking, the only biblical figure for whom his wife’s feelings were as important as his own.

It’s a very special thing to be able to put another person’s feelings, another person’s needs ahead of your own, to think of them first.  

I know this is easier said than done, but I know it intellectually and as father I try to model this for my own children. 

I’ll ask them to consider – why do you think your friend is upset?  What can you say or do to let them know you understand or just care how they feel?

Isaac has a lot more to teach us beyond the importance of taking other people’s feelings as seriously as we take our own.  

He does two more things that most of us, when we are called on to do them, find hard to do and they both qualify as greatness in small things. 

This brings me to the second case - he is able to forgive his father for all the things his father got wrong when he was raising him.

And we’re not talking about small things here, his father missing a ball game or a play he was in in high school.  

His father tried to kill him.  But Isaac was able to forgive him for that.  

We read that when Abraham died, both his sons,

Isaac whom he almost killed and Ishmael whom he virtually disowned, came together to bring him to his final rest with honor.  There is even a midrash suggesting that it was Isaac who persuaded Abraham to re-marry after Sarah died.

That is no small thing, to forgive your parents for their mistakes.

It is so human, so perversely satisfying at some level to blame and hold on to a grudge and so hard to let go of it. 

This summer I spoke with a woman after her father died. She told me, “I never loved my father.  He left the family when I was young and never sent us the money he was legally supposed to. My life would have been a lot better if I had had a real father when I was growing up.   I can’t think of a single reason why I should go to his  funeral or say Kaddish for him.”

I told her, “Let me try to give you one or two.  First, in your case, when you say Kaddish, you won’t be mourning the man who died because you miss him.  You’ll be saying Kaddish for the father you always wanted and never had, the relationship you yearned for and never had, and now it’s too late ever to have it. That’s the absence in your life that you’ll be grieving over.   And as far as the funeral goes, let me put it this way: If you attend and later feel that it was a mistake to go, you’ll feel badly for a short while, and the intensity of your pain will dissipate over time. If you stay away and later decide you should have gone, you’ll feel ache for the rest of your life.  You have a choice here.”

She didn’t come to the service.

            The probability is that in this congregation there are a number of families where grown children are estranged from their parents.  

They could probably make a good case for why the parents deserve it.

But for your sake and for theirs if they are still alive, it would mean so much to them and to you if you did what Isaac was able to do and bridge that gap.  

I can’t imagine your grievance is more serious than his.  

All it would take is a phone call wishing them a Good New Year. If you’re unsure about what to say or how to begin, tell them the Rabbi told you to do it.   And if they don’t appreciate it, that’s their loss.  

There is greatness in making the call, and at least you’ll know you did the right thing.  Greatness in small things.

And then there is one last act of quiet heroism that Isaac, this very ordinary, uncelebrated, unappreciated man, did.   This brings me to the third case -- he was able to forgive his children when they disappointed him.  

There is a passage in the Midrash which says that, on the Day of Judgment when all of us stand before God to answer for the things we did wrong, Isaac will be asked to plead Israel’s case as our defense attorney. 

              Isaac – the defense attorney for the Jewish people.  Why Isaac of all people?  

Because he will be able to say, “Master of the Universe, I had two children, Jacob and Esau.   One turned out to be a liar and one was a scoundrel, but they were my children and I was able to love them despite their faults. Can’t You do the same for your less-than-perfect children?”

We give our children life.  We feed them and nurture them and worry about them.

And then we send them out into the world.

But where is it written that, in exchange for what we’ve done, they have to spend their lives making our dreams come true?  

Why can’t they have their own dreams? And let them learn through their own mistakes.

Leora and I tried to let our kids follow their own interests when we had a few weeks this summer where our children were each doing different things – our 6^th grader was in cooking camp, our 5^th grader was at Yankee baseball camp, and our 3^rd grader literally ran off an joined the circus – iFlyTrapeeze camp. 

Where is it written that they have to fill in the gaps in our lives, living out our unfinished agendas instead of their own,         and passing our frustrations on to the next generation, like Cain becoming a tiller of the soil to make up to his parents Adam and Eve for the garden they had once had and lost, like Esau trying to gain his father’s love by being the hunter, the physically strong man his father yearned to be and never was? 

Can we accept the hard truth that they will be what they need to be, not what we need them to be?   

Can we accept the sometimes painful truth that our children will inevitably make the mistakes of youth, and when they do, our most helpful response should be Isaac’s response, to show them love rather than disappointment?  

Leora and I had a parenting light bulb moment when we heard the following lesson:  “When your kids are at their worst is when they NEED YOU the most”

I think this gem applies no matter how old they are or how rough “their worst” gets.

At this time of the year when we crowd our synagogues to admit before God that we have done some things this past year that we should not have done and we pray for that cleansing sense of acceptance despite our faults, how can we withhold from our own children the blessing we ask for ourselves?

There have been plenty of times in our people’s history when Jews were called on to perform extraordinary acts of heroism, to endure martyrdom because they were Jewish, to remain faithful in the face of discrimination and resourceful in a time of exile.

Ours is a time that calls on us to show a very different form of heroism, the heroism of achieving greatness in small things that are not really that small. 

In a world increasingly full of divisiveness, we need to recognize and honor greatness in small things more than ever.

Today’s heroism includes the parent dealing with a child with mental or physical challenges.

Today’s hero is the caregiver – yes, women, and also a silent army of husbands, brothers, sons and friends — about 16 million men — caring for their spouses, parents and other loved ones.

Today’s hero is the young person resolute enough to withstand the temptations that destroy so many lives.

Today’s hero is the teenager maintaining a strong Jewish identity in a world that so often mocks and devalues it.

Today, I ask you to commit to doing an act of kindness, on purpose and with intention:

make someone laugh,

make that phone call, send that text,

forgive yourself,

forgive others, encourage someone to pursue a goal.

Take a moment now.  Bow your head, and decide what you think you can do—for yourself, and for someone else. 

When you’ve landed on your small and great thing – raise your eyes. 

After Yom Tov, I’d love to hear about it – text or email me.

How did it go?  For you? For the other person?

As is said in the Kindness Diaries, “From a distance, the world seems like a big, bad, scary place. But up close there is enough good, enough love, and enough pure kindness to make the world go round.”

Today’s world asks of us the small-scale heroism of generosity, of kindness, of cheerfulness, of dependability, little things that change the world for the better.  

Today’s world asks of us that we exemplify the quiet greatness of Isaac, the willingness to see other people’s needs and other people’s feelings  as being as important to us as our own,  the readiness to forgive, to listen and not to judge, and sometime even to hear words that were not spoken.

There is greatness in being able to do that, the greatness that can be found in small things, and it is a greatness of which we are all capable. 

A new year has started. 

May it be God’s will that we fill each of our days with words and deeds that will increase the happiness of people around us, and in the process augment our happiness as well. 

SHANAH TOVAH.