Experts All?
Rosh HaShanah Eve 5782, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
L’Shana Tovah—may it be a good year, and a better, healthier, safer year for all of us. And may the strange restrictions we became so accustomed to, and then got used to not being accustomed to, and are now beginning to get reaccustomed to, not be required in this coming year. God-willing.
Comedian Stephen Wright may have summed up the last few months perfectly when he said, “If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.” Or as they said in the movie Jaws long ago, “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the ocean…”
Another great quote for these High Holy Days also comes from comedian Steven Wright. It’s this: “I intend to live forever - so far, so good.”
In a year in which the liturgy of the Unetaneh Tokef’s High Holy Days has never seemed more fitting--“Who by fire, who by water? Who by plague?”—it’s good to be back here in shul, with people in the seats, alive and celebrating the arrival of the New Year 5782. We certainly pray that it proves to be a better year, healthier, and certainly less apocalyptic than 5781.
We learned a lot this past year, and a much of it was in areas we never really wanted to learn about, wasn’t it?
I’ve been thinking about the idea of expertise, including the way it is addressed in Judaism. There is a term, in Talmudic language, mumcheh, which means expert. A mumcheh is a kind human super-authority on a subject. A mumcheh is a person who has so much knowledge on a subject that his or her opinion can almost literally take on the quality of divine authority.
And this year, there have been so many mumchehs among us! I mean, since our phones provide us with instantaneous access to the entirety of human knowledge, and we get fed a steady stream of news releases and urgent electronic alerts, haven’t we all of us kind of become automatic mumchehs on a wide variety of topics?
For example, who here has become an expert on virology in the last year? A mumcheh on infectious diseases? A true authority on vaccination technology and antibodies?
Now, in truth, I don’t actually believe that any one of us here tonight, or even on Facebook Live! is an actual authority. We don’t even play one on TV. But do we think we are authorities? Ah, we like to pretend, don’t we?
Abhijit Naskar and Mucize Insan write in their book When The World is Family, “Having the data is not the same as having the expertise to look through the data - if it were, everybody with a smartphone would be a doctor or a scientist.” It reminds me of that line in the movie “A Fish Called Wanda”—“Gorillas can read Nietzsche; they just can’t understand him.” We can all read the articles, but that doesn’t mean we understand them.
Even in Jewish tradition, which has so many sources of legitimate authority, the way that someone becomes an expert is rather vague. I quote an important Orthodox scholar with the improbable name of Rabbi Gil Student on this subject: “The way a mumcheh, an expert authorized to issue halakhic decisions, attains his position remains obscure.” He goes on to say that one of the qualifications appears to be popular acceptance—but that there is always an underlying assumption of Jewish piety and knowledge. Still, it’s a little puzzling: our own Jewish experts are chosen by a process that borders on the mystical. We think they know more than we do about a subject, and so we trust them to be right.
But of course, often they are not. And if experts, mumchim, can be wrong, what about the rest of us?
So, I ask you: in the past year, how often were you wrong? You know, how often did you think something would happen, particularly with regard to COVID-19, and were proven to be totally incorrect?
I’ll start the confessional, if that’s OK. Based on my deep knowledge of the science of pandemics, because I got a 4 on the AP Biology test after my last hard science class in high school a very long time ago, I can assure that I confidently predicted—way back last year, in the Jewish year 5780—the last year that actually included months where no one knew what it was like to put on a mask at all—way back then I predicted we would be able to celebrate Passover 5780 in person a month late, as Pesach Sheini, without the fear of Coronavirus hanging over our heads. I was a little off: by 18 months so far, and still counting.
And Sophie and I planned a wonderful honeymoon after our wedding in June of this year, 2021, out in East Asia—only to have every part of it cancelled by COVID-19 outbreaks, definitely a first-world problem we were able to re-reroute to other, recently opened destinations at in July. Still, I sure was wrong on that one.
And on many other things, of course. The great prophet Amos said, lo navi v’lo ben navi—I’m not a prophet nor am I the son of a prophet. And he actually was a prophet. I’m clearly not.
So, OK: How many of you thought this Coronavirus pandemic stuff would be over by now? On the other hand, how many of you thought it would be much worse than it has been? How many of you think that COVID-19 has been too politicized, based on your intimate knowledge of scientific data? And how many of you think that the protections against this dread virus have been too little observed?
The one thing I can guarantee is that we all have thought we are experts: and we all have been proven wrong, in one way or another.
Perhaps the best way to begin Rosh HaShanah is to start by finding our own humility, by realizing just how little we really do know.
Ok, so let’s talk my friends: Just how many of you out there feel that you predicted the way that this past year would go accurately? Me neither.
People say, "Why weren't we able to predict a disaster as big as the Coronavirus?" And the answer is: not everyone has 2020 vision. You know, because Coronavirus happened in 2020… I predict that you can now add that joke to the many things I need to atone for over these High Holy Days.
It has always been my contention that the best professions in the world are meteorologist and economist, who spend their careers predicting the future—neither is ever right, and yet both keep their jobs. Talk about job security.
In Judaism of course we are all reminded at this time of year just how little power we have to predict the future, or to control it. Over the past 5781 year we have certainly had it impressed upon us again and again that, like weathermen and economists, we truly have no idea what is coming next.
And this past year of Coronavirus ups and downs has been, to say the least, challenging for all of us. A story will illustrate it.
This coming Sunday my dad, my wife Sophie and I will fly to Los Angeles to celebrate the wedding of my oldest friend’s daughter, Danielle. It will be an elaborate affair, with hundreds of guests—who all have to have vaccination cards, of course—and lots of food, drink and simcha. When I say that we are celebrating her wedding, I mean that there will be a full Jewish wedding ceremony, including Ketubah signing and a bedeken and bridesmaids and groomsmen and toasts and dancing and a cake and everything you’d expect in a fahrputst Los Angeles Jewish wedding.
But I also mean that Danielle and her husband Andrew have actually been married for over a year. You see, the wedding was originally planned for Memorial Day 2020, and then rescheduled for October 2020, and finally re-re-scheduled for this September—inconveniently timed right between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, thank you very much—and with all that waiting the couple just finally went with their parents and got married in a safe ceremony at the courthouse. But they still wanted to have the full-on Jewish wedding, plus they had already paid for the full-on Jewish wedding, or at least my friend Ed had, so that’s going to happen, God-willing, with the current precautions in place this coming Sunday night. Strange days indeed.
What is that old Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times?
Look, those of us who plan for the future—which is nearly every Jew I’ve ever met—all think that we have a good idea of what’s coming next in life. But of course we don’t. As the Torah portion of Nitzavim, which we read last Shabbat, says, Hanistarot LAdonai Eloheinu v’haniglot lanu ul’vaneinu ad olam: the hidden things belong to God, but the revealed things belong to us and our children forever. Meaning, what we see and understand, well, that’s ours; but a whole lot is hidden from our view, the exclusive purview of the Ribono shel Olam, the Creator of the world, and God isn’t sharing that clear vision of the future any time soon with the likes of us…
As the old Yiddish aphorism goes, mensch tracht und Gott lacht, we plan and God laughs. Man proposes and God disposes. When it comes to preparation and planning we spend most of our energy and effort and lives on the practical stuff and neglect our souls and our character. But the truth is that we have very little control over the former and a lot of control over the latter.
I have to tell you one thing we have been taught by the COVID-19 pandemic is exactly that: we can plan as much as we like, but in the end we really have to just have faith that God has some idea what it is going on, because we, surely, don’t seem to know...
And in that realization comes a great gift.
Because the truth is that when we admit our own ignorance of the future, when we realize the daily details of our lives truly are trivial in the grand sweep of events, when we give up trying to fight the greater world by railing against it, well then we do have the capacity to examine our own lives and change for the better. When we come to understand that we are not really experts at all, not truly mumchim about everything, it becomes so much easier to look at those things about which we are experts—our work, our family, our friends, our congregation and community—and repair those relationships.
When we let go of our own expert authority over everything it becomes possible to see just what is we can fix—perhaps not the viruses in the air, but the virus of anger in our own hearts. Not the pandemic afoot in the world, but the irrational hostility that separate us from others. Not the destructiveness of distant wars but the arrogance that insists we know the only right way to be. Not even the theoretical starvation on another continent but the selfishness that prevents us from helping the hungry in our own midst.
We can be experts on ourselves, on how we can change and grow and heal.
Over these High Holy Days may we each become experts in our own souls. And may God give us the ability to find, first, our own humility—and then, the strength to become better, more loving, and more caring in this brand-new 5782.
Ken Yehi Ratson; may this be God’s will, and ours. L’Shana Tova!