Do Not Hide Yourself

Yom Kippur 5787

The Subway Doors

In April of 2017, a woman tried to step off a subway train in New York City just as the doors were closing. The doors caught her. Not her bag, not her coat. Her. 

She was pinned in place, half in the car and half out on the platform, and she could not move.

The train was not going anywhere. A train will not leave a station with a door open. So there was no emergency, exactly. 

There was just a woman held in the mouth of a subway door in the middle of a weekday, and there was a platform full of people.

And they walked past her.

Not one or two. The video shows a steady current of people flowing around her the way water goes around a rock. Nobody stopped. Nobody tried the doors. 

One person did do something. 

One person took out a phone and recorded it, which is the only reason we know about any of this at all.

Eventually a transit worker came and pried the doors open and the woman walked away, shaken and unhurt, and the video went out into the world, and everyone had the same reaction.

What is wrong with people?!

I want to challenge that reaction this morning. What’s wrong with people? Is that really the question? Don’t we mean what’s wrong with other people? We certainly don’t include ourselves. We’re not cold hearted bystanders.

But today, of all days, Yom Kippur is our day to be honest with ourselves.

We’re not bystanders??? Really?

Have we ever walked past a person in need … in the streets of NYC, in a Walmart parking lot? No eye contact, focus on the phone call – real or pretend phone call … don’t engage.

In our club houses and neighborhoods – have we ever thought, hmmm I haven’t seen so and so for a while, I wonder how they’re doing – and still we don’t pick up the phone.

Actually, as I’m writing this, I’m thinking of a decent sized list of people I’ve meant to call and just haven’t yet. Yes I am a bystander and if we’re honest, being a bystander is our resting state.

How could it not be – just look around at all the suffering in our world – how could we possibly intervene in every situation. Where would we even start?

So let’s just own it .. we are mostly bystanders … Maybe well intentioned, compassionate, good hearted bystanders, but bystanders nonetheless.

So today, I want to explore, what makes us care about others, take action and engage, and … what is the permission slip that allows us to walk on by.

And what does Judaism ask of us? What is realistic in our crazy world that can be dangerous and unpredictable. Are we expected to run into every burning building?

The Overpass

So let me bring you to the scene of another accident. This one is much more dire than being stuck in the doors of the subway.

As a college student in the 1990s, a young woman named Abigail, was driving south on Interstate 5 into Tacoma, Washington around midnight.

A dog ran into the road. She swerved, sadly she hit the dog anyway, but the swerve sent her car spinning across several lanes of a very busy freeway until it came to rest in the express lane, facing the oncoming traffic. 

The engine was dead, the car was trapped on a narrow overpass with no shoulder on either side.

There was nowhere to go. There was no one to call, because it was the nineties – no cellphones.

Abigail turned the key to the ignition and nothing happened. She turned it again and nothing happened.

Cars were coming over the crest of the overpass at seventy miles an hour and saw her headlights pointing the wrong way and swerved at the last second.

Every time a speeding car passed, Abigail’s car shook to the bones.

She sat there and understood, with real clarity, that she was going to die.

And then somebody knocked on the passenger window.

A man was standing outside her car, in the express lane, in a suit, wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night. 

He said, “You look like you could use some help.”

Here is what that man had done. He had come over that overpass, in that same river of traffic, and in the approximately 1.5 seconds he had to make a decision, he decided to pull off onto the ramp, get out of his car, and run across six lanes of freeway in the dark.

Then he waited for a gap, ran around to the driver’s side, knocked politely, and got in Abigail’s car.

He, miraculously, got the car started, waited for another gap in traffic, and drove her car across the highway to safety.

When they were basically safe, he asked if she wanted him to follow her home. She said no. 

He said, “Take care of yourself,” and he got back in his car and drove off into the night.

Abigail never learned his name. She has never been able to thank him. But she has been privately thanking him and wondering what made him do what he did her whole adult life.

Dr. Abigail Marsh is now a psychologist and neuroscientist at Georgetown University, and she has spent her entire career trying to answer what made that man do what he did.

Is he the one in a million altruistic hero? 

Or was he just a regular guy who happened to be brave enough and lucky enough to do something heroic in a moment of crisis.

What She Found

If we took a poll here about whether human beings are more on the side of selfishness or altruism – how would you vote? 

Are we as a species built to help others even at risk to ourselves or are we built to protect ourselves first and foremost.

What do you think?

I would have voted with the skeptics for sure.

I expected the data to say what everyone seems to believe as absolute scientific fact, which is that underneath our manners and our charity and our kind words, human beings are fundamentally out for ourselves.

That the man on the freeway in Tacoma was an anomaly, a beautiful glitch, and the subway in New York City was the truth.

But … get this! Dr. Marsh’s research says we are an unusually altruistic species. Unusually altruistic.

Of all the primates on the planet, we are the most willing to give to someone who will never pay us back.

Most primates do not do this. A mother carries her own infant and everyone else’s babies are their own problem. Animal mothers don’t routinely hand their babies over to other adults in the herd.

We, human beings, we hand our children to people constantly.

We have pediatricians and crossing guards and camp counselors and NICU nurses who sit up at three in the morning with someone else’s two-pound baby and cry when that baby goes home.

We have adoption. We have carpools. There is an entire career called “teaching,” where we trust other adults with our children.

There is a name for this. Scientists call it alloparenting. 

Allo is Greek for other. Other-parenting. 

And across the entire animal kingdom, it turns out to be the single best predictor of how generous a species will be toward total strangers. 

Not brain size. Not intelligence. How willing the adults are to care for a baby that is not their own.

And get this … Dr. Marsh’s says: That capacity to care for others as if they were our own, does not stay in the nursery.

Whatever machinery got built in us to make us care for other people’s infants is the same machinery that makes us care about adults we have never met.

Humans are built to care for human babies and it leaks. It leaks onto strangers, onto neighbors, onto people on the other side of the world whose names we will never learn, and yes, onto strangers trapped in cars on buzzing freeways.

When the man on I-5 ran across six lanes of traffic in the dark toward a car he could not see into, he was not overriding his nature. He was obeying it.

I want to say that again, because I think we have been taught the opposite most of our lives.

Goodness is not the exception we impose on ourselves by effort and discipline and religion. Goodness is the equipment. It is standard issue. It came in the box.

Which changes the experience of Yom Kippur completely.

If we are built selfish, then Yom Kippur is about strain. About gritting our teeth and forcing ourselves, one more year, to be better than we are. That is exhausting, and it is why so many people find this day exhausting. 

But that is not what this day is.

But … if the equipment is already in us, then every failure to use it is not a shortfall.

It is an interference. Something got in the way. 

Something talked us out of who we already were.

And that is a much more interesting spiritual experience. 

Not, God, make me into someone I am not.

But: God, what is it in me that keeps getting in the way of who I already am?

Torah for What Happened on That Platform

Our tradition of course has a teaching about this.

On the ancient biblical Yom Kippur, the prophet Isaiah is furious at people who fast so beautifully. They bow their heads like reeds. They are scrupulous about it.

And Isaiah says, this is not the fast I want. I want you to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the poor into your house, to clothe the naked.

And then he says something strange. U’mibesarcha lo tit’alam.

Do not hide yourself from your own flesh.

Do not hide.

That verb shows up somewhere else.

In Deuteronomy, we are told that if we see our neighbor’s animal wandering loose, we may not pretend we did not see it. 

If we see a donkey collapsed under its load on the road, we may not walk past. 

And the Torah says, lo tuchal l’hit’alem.

You are not permitted to hide yourself.

HNot don’t hide your eyes. Don’t hide Yourself.

The Torah understood something about human beings thousands of years before there were cell phone cameras catching us walking on by.

Moral failure is almost never a decision to be cruel.

Nobody on that platform thought, I will now leave this woman in the doors. What happens is quieter than that. Something in us steps behind something else in us, and by the time the moment is over, we were never fully there.

We are not hard-hearted. We are concealed.

This is also the entire plot of Jonah, which we read on Yom Kippur afternoon.

God tells Jonah that a city is in trouble.

Jonah gets on a boat going the opposite direction. A storm comes, the ship is coming apart, and where is the prophet? Below deck. Asleep.

And the captain of this boat, a man who does not share Jonah’s God and does not know his name, comes down into the hold and shakes him and says, mah lecha nirdam.

What is wrong with you, sleeper.

Meanwhile, listen to what those sailors are doing. They have figured out that the storm is about Jonah. They have every reason to throw him over and save themselves, as Jonah himself tells them to do.

And instead the text says they rowed. They rowed with everything they had to get the ship back to land, to avoid harming this stranger who has brought a tsunami down on their heads.

The sailors are not the villains of the book. They are its heroes. They are terrified, they are out of options, and they row anyway.  They are not hiding.

God’s prophet is in the basement, asleep, hiding.

The Curve and the Cliff

Let me go back to Dr. Abigail Marsh, because she learned something we can maybe relate to even more than the biblical Jonah.

After her near death experience on the freeway and after years of exploring altruism vs selfishness in human nature, she decided to study a group of people who are universally revered. 

Organ donors. Not just any organ donors but those who donate organs to strangers.

She brought these generous souls into her lab, and she gave them a test psychologists use called social discounting.

It works like this.

Imagine a hundred dollars.

How much would you give up to help your spouse? Most people, almost all of it.

Your child? All of it.

Your close friend? Quite a bit.

A coworker. An acquaintance.

Someone whose face you would not recognize.

For nearly every human being ever tested, in every country where they have run it, the line drops off a cliff.

We care enormously about the people closest to us. Our willingness to sacrifice falls away fast as people get further out. That is the standard shape of the human heart – a slow decline and then a sharp cliff.

But the anonymous kidney donors? Their results produced a curve unlike any she had ever seen. It barely dropped at all.

These people were willing to give up as much for a stranger as most of us are willing to give up for a friendly acquaintance.

She asked them why. And they were confused by the question.

Because they did not think they had done anything remarkable. 

Over and over they told her, kindly, that she was going to find nothing interesting in her study, because there is nothing special about us.

Anybody would do this. You have two kidneys. You can live with one. Someone will die without one. What is there to discuss?

And Dr. Marsh writes: of course. Of course that is how they think. Because if you truly believed you were the most important person in the room, why would you hand something of yours to someone lesser? 

The most important person should keep all the kidneys.

It is only when you are not convinced you are more precious than anybody else that giving starts to look obvious.

Friends, that is not just psychology, that is a teaching from our tradition around the year 200 CE.

Mishnah Sanhedrin teaches that the human being was created singular, one solitary person at the start, for a specific reason:

So that no one could ever say to another, my father was greater than your father. 

We all descend from one creator. Sounds basic, but it’s a really big deal.

In our daily lives and relationships,we mostly don’t experience that closeness.

We have our people and then there are others. We have our circle of helpfulness and then we have the cliff.  It seems normal, but is it our true nature?

Israel’s Famous Altruist

Here is a now famous story from October 7 about a young man named Aner Shapira.

He was twenty-two. He was from Arnona in Jerusalem. He was a staff sergeant in the Nahal Brigade, and that week he was on leave.

On Friday night he sat down to a Simchat Torah meal with his family. Then he went out to the Nova festival with his best friend, an American-born kid named Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

When the rockets started, a group of them ran for a small public bomb shelter by the road near Re’im. It is a concrete box. It has an open doorway and no door. 

Around two dozen young people crowded inside. The survivors all say the same thing about Aner, which is that he was the last one in.

Then the shooting got closer, and he understood what was coming.

He had time. This was not a reflex. This was not the man on the freeway with a second and a half to decide.

Aner Shapira stood in that doorway and did the math and knew exactly what was about to be thrown in it, and he turned around to the people behind him and told them out loud what he was going to do.

He said, if they throw grenades in here, I will throw them back. He asked the others to help him watch for them.

He announced it. In advance. To a room of terrified strangers.

And then he did it. A grenade came in and he caught it and threw it out, in under three seconds – remember a grenade in your hand does not tell you how long it has already been burning.

Another came in and he threw it out. And another. And another. Seven of them.

The eighth one killed him.

At least seven people walked out of that shelter alive. 

One of them, a young woman named Agam, wrote afterward that he saved their lives. She said that when he first came in, before any of it started, he told them the army was coming and he made them feel calm, and that the last thing she said to him was thank you for coming in here, you are keeping us calm.

She wrote, I have never seen so much nobility in one person.

He was twenty-two.

Eight hours earlier he had been at his parents’ table for a holiday meal.

Now let’s consider … I can’t imagine that Aner Shapira was unafraid.

Nobody stands in that doorway unafraid. He was a trained soldier who knew better than the rest of us how bad the odds were, which means he was not less frightened than we would have been. He was more frightened.

That is what courage is.

One of Dr. Marsh’s kidney donors was nineteen years old and so frightened of needles that she fainted during blood draws.

Do you know how many blood draws it takes to donate a kidney?

She did it anyway. Not because the fear went away. Because it turned out to be less important than the person at the other end.

Aner Shapira stood in a doorway and said out loud what he was going to do, so that the people behind him would know they were not alone in the dark. And then he kept his word seven times.

None of us will be asked for that. Thank God.

But every one of us, this year, will be asked for some much smaller version of not hiding, of standing where we can be seen.

What Judaism Actually Asks

So let me answer the question I can feel some of you asking. If a man ran across six lanes of freeway, and a twenty-two-year-old caught grenades in a doorway, what exactly is Judaism asking of me? 

I have a job. I have a family. There is a limit, and I would like to know where it is.

Our tradition’s answer is not martyrdom. Judaism is remarkably unromantic about self-sacrifice. 

The Talmud imagines two people in the desert with one flask of water, enough for only one of them to survive. Ben Petura says share it, even if both die.

 Rabbi Akiva says no. Chayecha kodmin, your life comes first. The one holding the flask drinks. The law follows Rabbi Akiva.

So no, you are not expected to be a martyr. What is expected is not to hide.

We are not permitted to hide.

Look at how the Torah legislates this. Return the lost object. Help lift the fallen animal. Leave the corners of your field. Pay the worker before sundown. Not one of those is heroic. Every one of them is a regular Tuesday.

And they are not framed as generosity. 

The word we use, tzedakah, does not mean charity. It comes from tzedek, justice. 

Charity is what you choose to do when you feel generous. 

Justice is what is owed whether or not you are feeling generous this morning. 

Our tradition does not assume you are selfish and must be threatened into decency. It assumes you are a person who gives, and it simply makes sure you do not forget.

How We Actually Start

So how do we get there? Dr. Marsh has a theory. She noticed that an oddly large number of Hollywood action stars end up rescuing real people. 

Here are some crazy example:

Jamie Foxx smashed a window and pulled a man out of a burning truck that had flipped over in front of his house. 

Kate Winslet ran out of a burning building carrying Richard Branson’s elderly mother. 

Harrison Ford has gone up in his own helicopter to find lost hikers, twice.

And Tom Cruise has done it so many times it is almost a comedy routine. 

Here was1996: 

In March he came upon a hit and run in Los Angeles, called the ambulance, followed it to the hospital, learned the young woman had no insurance, and paid her bill. 

In August, sailing off Capri, he spotted a boat on fire, sent his own skiff across, and got five people off a rubber raft before their boat went under

And in December, at the London premiere of his own movie, he noticed two boys being crushed against the barricades by the crowd, and he reached in and pulled them out. One of them was seven years old.

Dr. Marsh suggests, carefully, that these people may run toward danger in real life because they have spent years rehearsing it. 

It was pretend in their action movies, but the nervous system does not entirely care that it was pretend.

Because the real barrier, she says, is not selfishness. 

It is that in the moment, we do not believe we can handle how afraid we feel. The fear is so loud it reads as information. It reads as: you cannot do this.

When Senator Cory Booker carried his neighbor out of a burning house in 2012, he was asked what it felt like. 

He said he would like to say he felt courageous, but it was terrifying. That is the point. 

Fearless is not brave. Brave is feeling every bit of the fear and deciding there is something in that room more important than your fear.

The only thing that has ever fixed that fear, for anybody, is evidence. 

You do a hard thing. You are frightened. And then it is over and you are still standing.

 Your brain files that away, and the next time the fear shows up, it is not quite so authoritative.

Which means we can practice. Not in a burning building. 

We practice by doing the small thing that scares us.

The hard conversation we have put off for months. 

Walking up to the person standing alone at the social event. 

Calling the woman whose husband died months ago, the call you have not made because you are so afraid of saying the wrong thing. 

For some of us, asking for help is the most frightening item on the list.

Do that. Be scared while you do it. Notice afterward that you survived. 

That is the whole training program.

And every time we do it, we are not manufacturing courage we did not have. 

We are coming out of hiding.

The allo-parenting was always there. The fear was just standing in front of it.

Acharei hape’ulot nimshachim halevavot. 

The heart is drawn after the deeds. 

We do the thing first, frightened and unprepared, and the person we already were comes up out of hiding to meet us.

Your neshamah shines through, and you just have to say, welcome home.

The Day We Reveal the Good

We think of today as the day we expose what is wrong with us. It is. But it is not only that.

Every morning we say a line that is essential to our community. Elohai, neshamah shenatata bi, tehorah hi. My God, the soul you placed within me is pure.

Not will be pure, if I work hard enough this year. Not could be pure, under better conditions. Is pure. Right now. This morning. Before I have done one single thing to earn it.

And we say it on this day too. 

On the morning with the longest list of failures in our entire liturgy. Think about the audacity of that. 

Just a few hours between My Soul is Pure and For the sin of …44 items on that list.

Rebbe Nachman taught that when you look at a person, including yourself, especially yourself, you have to hunt for the nekudah tovah, the one good point that is still in there. 

And when you find it, he said, you have moved that person toward the side of merit. He insisted you do this even when you are certain you are nothing but failure. Find one good point. Then find another.

Because here is what I have learned from sitting with people in this community for a very long time. We are more comfortable confessing what we did wrong than admitting what we are capable of.

So bring your list today. Bring all of it. But do not think the list is the whole confession.

Today is not only the day we stop hiding from what we did.

It is the day we stop hiding what is good in us.

Stand Where We Can Be Seen

Tonight the fast ends and the world goes back to being ordinary, and this is the part where a sermon usually asks you to become a different person.

I am not going to ask that. 

You are not a selfish creature who needs to be argued into decency. You are a person built to carry somebody else’s child, and the only thing standing between you and who you already are is a habit of stepping out of view.

So do not resolve to be good. Resolve to be visible.

Aner Shapira z’l stood in a doorway and told the people behind him exactly what he was going to do, so that they would know they were not alone in the dark. 

He resolved to be visible and that saved lives. 

We are not being asked to toss off grenades. We are being asked to stand where we can be seen.

I want to end with my personal confession.

I have walked past people. 

I have seen the name on the phone and not picked it up. 

I have noticed the empty seat and meant to call and not called. 

I am not standing up here as the person who figured this out.

I am standing up here because I need to say this aloud and I need all of you as witnesses and partners.

And that is why our confession is in the plural. Al chet shechatanu, for the sin we committed.

So let it be all of us, together, in the same room, admitting the same small ordinary failures.

We saw, and we kept walking.

And then tomorrow, let it be all of us who stop. 

Let us be seen to each other and to ourselves.

G’mar chatimah tovah.