"Life, The Movie"

Rosh Hashanah Day 1, 5760 (1999)

It is very difficult to be an actor. You have to put on lots of make-up so that you really look convincing in your role. You have to wear the right clothes, you have to make the proper gestures and you must keep your own true self somewhat hidden lest it interfere with your role.

This is probably not news to any of us because, frankly, we’re all actors. To an increasing extent, all of us have to present ourselves to one another. Whether it is at work or at school or even within our homes, we often have to keep our own true selves hidden.

Neal Gabler, an insightful critic of contemporary American culture, goes further. He argues that American society has evolved to the point where all of us are acting practically all the time. The way he puts it is that all of us are starring in a very popular movie going around that just about everyone has seen. It’s an enormously entertaining movie because, well, that’s what movies are, and this is no different.

It’s the movie called, "Life," starring "Everyone."

In his book, Life, the Movie, Gabler argues – and it’s hard to disagree with him – that everything in our society has become a branch of show business, and our own private lives are no different.

Gabler’s thesis has three parts. First, entertainment plays a powerful role in this country. It is the product we most value. Entertainment bombards us every time we turn on the television, every time we open up a newspaper, every time we listen to the radio.

Second, we live in a world populated by celebrities. These are men and women who, in Daniel Boorstin’s brilliant phrase, are people who are well-known, not for anything that they’ve done, but for being well-known. (See p.144) Whether they inhabit the worlds of politics, journalism or the arts, celebrities are people whose life experiences rather than their accomplishments serve to entertain us.

When we hear the name "Elizabeth Taylor," for example – to pick a well-known Hollywood celebrity – we may remember her memorable performance in National Velvet, but we’re probably as likely to think of the many roles she’s played in the sad story of her life, played out before us in the tabloids found in the supermarket check-out line.

Similarly, when we think of a celebrity like "Madonna," we are more likely to think of one or another of her re-incarnations of herself, rather than of any of her stage performances. (Incidentally, it is a sign of the extraordinary value our culture places on celebrity as opposed to accomplishment that in the new dictionary published by Microsoft, this Madonna, the twentieth century Madonna, was the first of the two entries under that name.)

Politicians, as we know, have also turned into celebrities. That is, the more famous they become, the more likely we are to look to them not so much to address our national problems, but to entertain us. It was former President Ronald Reagan who once said, "There have been times in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do the job if you haven’t been an actor." (p.110) And it was for good reason that Kurt Andersen of The New Yorker labeled the President of the United States the "Entertainer-in-Chief." (p.102)

These two developments – the explosion of entertainment and the proliferation of celebrities in our culture -- have had an insidious effect on all of us. In the words of the American sociologist David Riesman, we have become "outer-directed" rather than "inner-directed" individuals. Rather than looking within to the values implanted within us early in life, we spend much of our time looking to our contemporaries for direction, guidance and approval, as we play our parts as starring actors in "Life, the Movie."

Some of us feel the pull so strongly that we become exhibitionistic, parading our lives before the camera. Approximately one thousand Americans appear on daytime television talk shows in a given week. Others perform outrageous acts – some even commit crimes -- in order to invite publicity.

But even ordinary Americans who are in neither of these categories are not unaffected. All of us feel the pull to act, to play out a role. Advertisers spend millions of dollars trying to get us to dress in certain ways, eat certain foods, and behave just like everyone else in our particular cohort, whether it be "baby boomers," "empty nesters," or Generation X-ers". Even children are not immune. According to a recent story in the New York Times, the "talk of the retail world this fall" is a new line of brand-name clothing … aimed at girls six to ten years old. (September 7, 1999, p. C-13) These youngsters, described as newly "style empowered" (another word for "hooked"), are being targeted by marketers anxious to get them to play their role as cute kids in the Life movie.

Now we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves, because frankly it’s a natural human tendency to try not to stand out, to want to blend in. In the Book of Jonah, which we read on Yom Kippur, when God tells Jonah to go east -- to the middle of a huge pagan city -- and urge the people to repent, what does he do? Naturally, he goes west. He goes down to Jaffa and buys passage on a ship, trying to blend in among all those sailors.

You could argue that it all goes back to Adam and Eve. After they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they put on fig leaves and tried to hide among the trees in the garden. They too wanted to blend in with their surroundings.

The way the Bible puts it, Jonah and Adam and Eve were trying to flee from God, but a Hasidic teaching tells us, no, that’s not what they were doing. They were really hiding from themselves. And maybe we’re doing the same.

The problem with playing a part in the national movie called "Life" is that it is dangerous for the soul. We might forget who we are. As the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Man, Superman (quoted on p.219), "Whenever someone strives long and persistently to appear to be someone else, he ends up finding it difficult to be himself again." To paraphrase the playwright Sam Shepard, we might end up becoming the people we’re pretending to be. And then we won’t be able to do the work which this day beckons us to perform.

Our task this day is teshuvah, or repentance. The first step in this process, as Martin Buber taught, is finding our way from the "casual, accessory elements of [our] existence to our own selves". This is not easy, he says, because it "is contrary to everything we are accustomed to."

We have to try to resist society’s pressure, and try not to be anonymous characters in a movie, acting out scenes for the benefit of some vague, undefined audience. That prevents us from connecting authentically with ourselves, with God and with other human beings.

In today’s Torah reading, we are told that "God heard the cry of the boy [Ishmael] ba-asher hu sham – where he was, or, as he was there." It’s an odd phrase. But if we read that verse literally, we can understand it to reinforce this point: God heard the cry of the boy, but only because he was who he was. Only an authentic cry, only the cry of someone who is himself or herself, can be heard. That’s why we blow a simple, natural horn, a shofar, on this day and not a trumpet. In the Talmud, the question was asked, can we gild the mouthpiece of the shofar so that the sound is clearer? And the answer is no. We must listen to the pure, un-enhanced sound of a shofar being itself.

In the book of Exodus, when God tells Moses to come up the mountain so that he can dictate the Torah, he says to him, "Alay elai ha-harah v’yey sham." – Come up to Me on the mountain and …Be there!" This seems redundant: If Moses climbs the mountain, where else would he be but there? But the Kotzker Rebbe makes the point that there are times when we are someplace without really being there, i.e., when we’re acting. Moses was instructed to be fully present and open to his relationship with God when he stood atop Sinai. He was instructed to be himself.

We can do this. But how do we get there? How do we reach our true, unmediated selves?

First, we have to reflect. We have to sit and reflect. That’s the purpose of coming here. This is a place where it’s appropriate to think about who we are, where we’re going, what God demands of us, and how well we’re living up to those demands. Of course, it isn’t so easy to do it here, today of all days, for obvious reasons. In this room on a day like today, it’s hard to avoid being an extra in the movie, "Rosh HaShanah in America." But one simply has to try to be here in order to be here. Not to be seen, but to see new things within oneself. It demands concentration and attention and it’s hard. But it’s not impossible.

We have to be ourselves outside of this room as well. It means we have to be honest with people, not only in our speech, but in our dress and in our appearance. Let’s try not to be, or seem to be, someone we’re not.

Finally, authenticity of self must lead beyond the self. We have to reach out and help other people. And this we should do modestly, not in order to gain recognition, but because it is the right thing to do. The goal is not to become known as a person who performs mitzvot; the goal is to perform mitzvot for their own sake.

* * * * * * * * * * *

In the Garden of Eden, after Adam and Eve had eaten of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God goes looking for them. And he cries out, "Ayecka? -- Where are you?" What an absurd question! Of course he knows where they are! He wasn’t asking, "Where are you located?" After all, the Garden wasn’t that big, they were the only people in it – how difficult could it have been to find them!

Maybe what God meant was, "Where are you, the real you? You’re not behaving like yourself. You’re behaving like someone else. Where are you hiding? Where’s the real You, that wonderful image of God with which I endowed you?

Those are the questions God is asking each one of us. God wants us to stop playing our roles – if only for these ten days of repentance. God wants us to stop thinking about how well we look to others and think more about how well we look to God.

On this day on which we cry out to God, zochreinu l’hayim – "Remember us to life," let us remember to strive for life, real life, a life in which we appreciate the blessing of being ourselves, a life of wholeness, of shleimut, whose integrity brings us closer to God and to those around us.

Amen.