Choices that matter

Kol Nidrei 5759 (1998)

In the Talmud, in the first chapter of the tractate Berakhot (incidentally, the chapter that our Tuesday evening adult education class studied last year) detailed instructions are given to couples who desire to determine the gender of their children.

Couples are told that if they wish, say, to conceive male children, they should orient their marital beds in a north/south direction, whereas, if they wish to conceive girls, they should orient their beds in an east/west direction. [B.Berachot 5b; Abba Benjamin, R. Hama b. R. Hanina, b'shem R. Isaac, based on Psalm xvii:14.]

Now, before anyone starts pulling out those old Boy Scout compasses, let me say that in the almost two thousand years since that recommendation was made, I am aware of no evidence that it helps one bit. Put a bit more charitably, the technique probably works about fifty percent of the time.

And so it has been with the many other techniques that have been proposed. Nevertheless, that hasn't stopped people in every generation from trying to find a successful method of determining the gender of their children.

This age-old search took a promising turn recently. In an article published recently in the New York Times [September 9, 1998], researchers claim that they have discovered a new, highly effective method for determining the gender of a child at conception. For the first time in history, a gender selection technique that really works.

I applaud this new development, because whatever we learn about the human being can always be put to good use. The researchers are to be commended. Reproductive technologies, in particular, are extremely important. They have helped many, many couples conceive, which is a wonderful thing. And in the article, the researchers made clear that this new knowledge can help, say, couples at risk for passing on sex-linked genetic diseases, allowing them to conceive healthy babies when they otherwise might not be able to.

On the other hand, the researchers admit that they expect to be approached by many couples who simply prefer, for their own personal reasons, to conceive a child of a particular gender.

Now, I don't mean to pass judgment on those who might desire to do this. Who am I to say that, say, a mother of a dozen boys shouldn't try to shift the odds a bit to increase the chances that her next child will be a girl?

But if the desire to determine gender is just one part of a broader effort to try to create the perfect family, with just the right balance - which I suspect, in many cases, it is -- then it is, well, misplaced. It is futile.

Selecting a child’s gender does not produce the perfect family. Human beings of both genders are, as we know, unique. Selecting a child with the "right" gender won’t insure that they won’t want a a tongue ring or a tattoo; it won't make them more athletic or smart or hopeful or courageous.

The "perfect" family is, in any event, an idealized image, and trying to create it doesn’t make our homes more loving or nurturing. Most important, determining the gender of our offspring does not protect us from what life may have in store for us.

In the liturgy that we'll be reciting tomorrow, there is a beautiful passage, which unfortunately comes at a time when few of us are able to appreciate it. Many of us have gone home, and those that remain are generally weary. It is the prayer recited by the High Priest upon leaving the Holy of Holies at the very end of performing all of the rituals of atonement (We recite it at about 2:00 in the afternoon):

May it be thy will, [the high priest says] ... that the forthcoming year shall be ... a year of abundant prosperity, a year of grain, wine and oil, a year of attainment and success; ... a year of enjoyable living; ... a year of success in business; a year of plenty and delight; ... a year in which you will bless the works of our hands.

And for the people of Sharon [a region which was subject to sudden earthquakes] he prayed: May their homes not become their graves.

Why does the high priest recite such a prayer AFTER he's performed all of the Yom Kippur rituals? After all, if he has been working all day at seeking atonement for the people, and has been successful, why does he even need to worry about these things?

The answer is that all the atonement in the world isn't going to put food on the table during tough economic times. All the atonement in the world isn't going to prevent illness or misery. All the atonement in the world is not going to prevent our homes from being torn down by a hurricane or destroyed by an earthquake.

The passages from the Torah that we read on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur reinforce this. They expose us to the utter unpredictability of our lives and the impossibility of predicting our fates. If we had stopped reading Genesis at chapter 19, would we have predicted (as we read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah) that Ishmael would have been banished from Abraham's home? Would we have predicted (as we read on the second day) that Isaac would have come so close to death?

Things don’t always work out the way we plan. With austere understatement, the Yom Kippur Torah reading makes the point equally directly with its opening words, "Aharei Mot", "After the death...." Aaron, who is about to be instructed how to perform the rituals of atonement, has just suffered the loss of his two sons. We're not told exactly why, which is perhaps the point. How could any explanation ever be adequate to the existential challenge of explaining why bad things happen to us?

We don't know and we never will know what life will bring. We may reach a point where we'll know, as surely as we could ever know, that the gender of a child-to-be that we hope to conceive is female. But will we know whether she'll be happy? Whether, indeed, she'll be born at all, or live to marry and have children of her own?

Nonetheless, we actually have a great deal of influence over the future. In fact, we can determine the future to an unbelievable degree. The reason is that we are totally free to behave any way we wish. And we can choose to be good or to be bad.

The Talmud makes this explicit. In the Bible, there's a verse describing the creation of humanity which reads, "Vayeetzer Ha-Adam" -- "And God created the human being." But the word "Vayeetzer" is written in an unusual way, with two yods instead of one. Basing himself on this unusual spelling, Rabbi Yossi tells us that human beings are created with two "yetzers", two inclinations; one toward the good and one toward the bad. And every one of us, not only Adam, is created this way. We're hard wired to be able to make choices, to be able to act in different ways.

And if we make the wrong decisions, if we act improperly, we can always turn back. Teshuvah, repentence, is part of the structure of the universe. According to the rabbis, it was created before the physical universe. We can always turn back, from any path we've taken.

The choice at every moment is ours, and the outcome is ours.

A colleague of mine is the child of holocaust survivors. Her mother survived the war by living in a series of hideouts on farms in Poland. At any point they could have been detected, captured, killed. At one point, while they were hiding in a barn, my friend’s grandmother insisted that my friend’s mother, who was eight at the time, keep up her reading. Whenever food was delivered to the farmer who sheltered them, she would take the newspaper that the food was wrapped in and have the little girl read it to her. One of the others who was hiding with them yelled at her: Why waste your breath? Why insist that the girl reads? What’s the point! You should be putting all of your energy into teaching her how to survive!" To which the little girl’s mother said, "Look, we’re either going to survive or we won’t. If we do, I want her to remember how to read. And if we don’t, she shouldn’t waste her time, either." There’s more to life than survival.

We may not have control over what happens to us, but we actually have enormous control over how we will respond. We have enormous control over what kind of people we are. Our challenge is to exercise that control.

There is a story in the Talmud. We learn that at the moment of conception, the angel in charge of conception, an angel named Laila, descends and scoops up the embryo and brings it up to God and asks God, "Will this baby grow up to be intelligent or foolish? Will it be strong or weak? Will it become wealthy or poor?" And presumably he gets an answer to his questions.

The text goes on to tell us, though, that there is one question that he does not ask, and that is, "Will this child grow up to become a tzadik or a rasha, a good person, or an evil-doer?"

He doesn't ask this question, because even though God knows whether the child will become a boy or a girl and presumably knows the answers to all of those other questions, God doesn't know the answer to that question. God doesn't know whether or not any baby will grow up to become a tzadik or a rasha. As Rashi puts it, in his commentary on this passage,

This is the question that God puts to us, for everything is in His hands except for this, which is in our hands.

[b.Niddah 17b, s.v. "Ki im l'yirah". See also b.Berakhot 33b, b.Megillah 25a]

Whether or not we're going to do good is entirely up to us.

Let us focus our attention on what we can influence, which is how we will behave and how we will respond as we live our lives. May we worry less about what is beyond our control, and devote ourselves more fully to what is. Amen.

And although choosing gender might seem an easy way to do just that, it isn't at all. Everyone is unique and we can't try to turn one human being into an idealized image that exists only in our minds. We'll fail. Turning our children into the "right" gender won't prevent them from wanting

A few days ago, many men and women from our congregation were busy cleaning this place up. And boxes and chairs and tables were flying all over the place. There was, though, one large object, a large counter, in the middle of the hall that wasn't moving. The reason is that there was a sign on it. The sign read: "Ignore for now."

Now that sign made sense, because there was a clear plan for that counter to get moved later and eventually it did. But it made me wonder: What if it hadn't been moved? We would have been in big trouble! Fifteen hundred people trying to get around this big object in the middle of the hallway? Not so easy!

We may be contending with the same problem within us. We may have become aware of internal matters that need to be addressed, and yet may have put signs on them reading, "Ignore for now." Those signs can stay there an awfully long time. We may find ourselves going about our routine, stepping around those obstacles blocking our path rather than taking the time and effort to contend with them.

Today is the day set aside by our tradition to take a hard look at those obstacles and to move them out of the way. Today, our motto should be: "Do Not Ignore! Not now!"