I should probably start with a spoiler.
I’ve no big personal announcement to make in this sermon. I
want to talk about its subject because I think it’s important. I want to talk
about quitting, or moving on to new challenges or … that sort of thing. But, as
I said, I’ve no big personal announcement.
Over the summer, an article spread through the social media of
my friends.[1]
The fact that I don’t think anyone here saw it, says much about my social media
friendship circle. A lot of rabbis.
In the article, the Rev Alexander Lang, formerly of the First
Presbyterian Church of Arlington Heights, Illinois, explained why he was
leaving his Church, actually not just moving on from his church, but as he put it,
“leaving the pastorate all together. I have become,” he wrote, “Part of what is
known as the Great Pastor Resignation” – capital ‘G’, capital ‘P’, capital ‘R’
He had some rather pointed insight into some of the more
unusual elements of being a Pastor. The management lines in my profession are,
indeed, rather confusing. On the one hand I’m supposed to be spiritually
advising you, but on the other hand you pay my wage. And my real direct line manager
– for all God’s remarkable qualities - doesn’t give me a six-monthly opportunity
to discuss Sustainable Measurable Attainable Reasonable and Time-Bound targets.
The Rev Lang cited a survey that suggested that 38% of
protestant pastors considered leaving the ministry last year, citing a
combination of the stress, feeling lonely, political divisions the toll on
their personal and family life and … well there’s a long list.[2]
I hope, you can understand the partially lurid fascination my
rabbinic friends and I had with the article. But I don’t suspect – that even those
of you who aren’t ordained - you would be particularly surprised.
While there are things in the article that are particular to
the pastorate, the Great Resignation is quite definitely a thing. There are the
school teachers; 7,800 left teaching in 2021 and 40,000 left last year. And the
health care professionals. And the corporate executives and … I suspect you all
have more than enough understanding that combination of over-stressed,
under-appreciated, febrile, burnt-out …
Actually, there’s another thing on my mind, in that space that
hovers between the over-stressed, under-appreciated and febrile space –
marriages. It might just be the age of my cohorts, but among my peers, I’ve
noticed an uptick in the number of divorces as marriages I have known, and sometimes
officiated at, have come to an end.
And on the one hand, change is the thing we talk about on Yom
Kippur. Change, the ability to take agency over a life that could be better and
doing things to make our life different, is exactly what we are supposed to be
doing here.
But on the other hand, there’s a sadness.
It’s not that there is anything particularly wrong, I think,
with changing careers, I’ve done it, many of us have. It’s not, I believe, that
there is anything wrong with divorce. We aren’t Catholics – divorce is
definitely no sin. But there’s a sadness.
For the most part the language is fine, people sharing that
fifteen years, or whatever, has been a good run, there’s much to be grateful
for, they just don’t want to be there anymore. But for me, I was at these
weddings, I was there under the Chuppah and I remember the conversations before
the Chuppah when the language was so very different.
For those couples, at that time – just before the wedding, the
notion that they would be moving on fifteen years later calling it a good run
would have been astounding. And it would have felt like failure.
Again, I want to be really careful. For many of the people
leaving teaching, or medicine or even the rabbinate, the problem isn’t the teaching
or the medicine, but a whole bunch of other factors that have nothing to do
with how much they love teaching or medicine. And it may well be that when a
couple tell a Rabbi their relationship has merely run its course there are
other far sharper and more destructive elements at play. There may be very good,
very healthy and very spiritually refined reasons why a person wants out.
But, I think, there is still something, even making allowance
for all that. There are ways in which we empty ourselves out of the ability to
stay in love with things we once loved. There’s something about the pace of the
world and a loss of the ability to find regenerating energies, maybe because of
the way the world has been heading for some time, or possibly because of how
the world has been functioning since lockdown.
Viewed from the present, what would the ‘now’ version of our
lives go back and say to the ‘back then’ version of our lives. Can we see
moments in our past where, with more bravery and more insight, we could have
adjusted our trajectory so we wouldn’t arrive at ‘today’ feeling the need to
walk away from something we once loved.
Teshuvah – return. Can we take this to mean the return to find
delight and love in things that once did, but threaten no longer to, delight
us, and nurture us?
For me there are two sides to this – sustainability and amazement.
I spend a lot of time thinking about sustainability, not just from
an ecological perspective, but a personal and professional one.
There’s an idea in professional cycling – the Tour de France
riders – that they are incredibly careful about how and when they go into the
red. It’s something they can do for a short burst, but it’s not sustainable for
the duration of a race and they know they need to time these moments of maximum
effort incredibly carefully and protect the opportunity to replenish with real
effort. For the sprinters, the very fastest speed merchants in the peleton,
they expect to go in the red for fifteen seconds over the course of a four-hour
bike race. Because they know if they do more than that, it comes at a long-term
cost. Fifteen seconds in a four hour race.
How are we doing with our policing our dips into the red?
We need to fight harder to make ourselves sustainable. We
can’t always be cycling ‘in the red.’ And while I know there are always
opportunities to consider moments emergent, we do, as a society, as family
members and as professionals, need to work so much harder to make sure we find
opportunities to replenish.
It's not a new problem. God took six days to create the world –
on the pressures of our workaday existence – and then took a day off to Vayinafash
– to be re-ensouled, to regenerate, to balance out the dip into the red.
I know the world out there doesn’t look as though it’s
prepared to cut a bunch of observant Jews the space in which to leave work
early on a Friday afternoon in winter – it’s been, I know for many of you, hard
enough just to take a day from work for Yom Kippur. But I wonder if there is a
different way of selling to ourselves and the worlds in which we live, both
personal and professional, that we need to care for our sustainable existence.
We need to carve out and protect the places and practices which
allow us to take pleasure from our lives, for our love and for our work. Taking
a Friday dinner together with friends and family, spending an evening with the
phones off and away. The wisdom of desperately ancient modes of the observance
of Shabbat is, I think, ever more obvious.
This attempt to carve out and protect has always been a
demand. Again, the models are very ancient. Biblically, celebration of the day
of rest would always take an additional sacrifice. Sustainability takes
sacrifice of the now for the future. What that looks like, for our personal
relationships or professional ones will be radically different. None of us is
going to be offering up an additional cow. But we need to get better at saying
no, and prioritising our longer term over the thing that feels so immediate.
I hope, somewhere in our exhaustion at the end of this,
entirely non-sustainable, twenty-five hour fast, we can feel that. I hope that
somewhere in our exhaustion, we can experience the benefit of taking time away
from the things that grind us down and we can make the case for it, and be
prepared to sacrifice to protect those re-charging moments.
That’s one side – sustainability.
The other side is amazement. By which I mean the sacred work
of trying to be amazed by things that could, so easily feel just normal.
There is a line in the morning service, in the part where we
are supposed to feel awe for the creation of the world and it’s light, where we
say, of God,
עוֹשֶׂה חֲדָשׁוֹת.
הַמְ֒חַדֵּשׁ בְּטוּבוֹ בְּכָל־יוֹם תָּמִיד מַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית
The Doer of new things, the One
who in goodness, renews each day continually, the stuff of creation.
What a wonderful thing it would be to see this supposed newness.
What a thing if we didn’t take for granted the newness all around. There is, of
course, newness all around. From the way the light is beginning to set in this
room, never been seen before, to the way I can look up and catch an eye of
someone here, never happened before.
But similarly, I can be just too tired or stressed to see
anything different about anything. Even if there are miracles unfolded before
my eyes at every moment.
I think, to stay excited about the life we have, we need to
tend our sense of wonder, amazement. There is another blessing, almost the very
first of a morning,
We bless God for the ability to see. It’s a blessing to say
when you wake up to see the same room, the same sheets, possibly even the same
life partner, to inculcate a sense of wonder at the amazing thing it is to be
able to see at all.
There’s an effort involved, a sort of will-full finding of
things delightful.
I don’t think it just happens, it needs to be cultivated and
tended. It is the sacred work of our existence. And it is the thing that keeps
us feeling delight in our life.
Sustainability and amazement.
If you are fortunate enough to love the thing you do and the
people you do it with, I salute you. I wish you continue to feel those things
for the rest of your life. But even if you do, I urge you not to rest easy in
that privileged position. It’s easy to burn out, it’s easy to habituate.
And if there is a niggling, what do we call it?, sense of
fatigue, sense that we might be emptying out our reserves of love, I urge you
to take more care to be sustainable and
amazed by life.
And if you’re thoroughly miserable at your life, I’m sorry but,
I think, even in misery, making time for a recharge of our spirits and making
the effort to be amazed by the gifts we have is so important. It’s how we can know
and build confidence in the necessity of doing differently as we go forward.
A commitment to sustainability and amazement might even be the
keys for the new life, in this new year, we wish for ourselves.
May it come to us all and all we care for, in peace, in health
and in sweetness,
May we be so sealed,
Chatimah Tovah.
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