The Sermon For The Teenagers

My Yom Kippur fantasy: I want to speak to a congregation that consists only of teenagers. Imagine that it is Yom Kippur. This is what I would say.

If you have been paying attention, it has been a bad year for celebrity deaths. There was, of course, the late comedian and actor, Robin Williams, which might have been the most tragic. There was the great actress, Lauren Bacall. She was about ninety years old. It was, as people sometimes say, her time. And there was the comedienne Joan Rivers, whose death was also very sad and perhaps also avoidable.

But in some ways, the saddest death was that of one of the greatest actors of our time, Philip Seymour Hoffman.

My favorite Philip Seymour Hoffman movie was “Almost Famous.” The movie is set in the 1970s. William Miller is fifteen years old. He wants to be a rock critic and write for Rolling Stone magazine. So, he pretends to be an adult, and he tours with a rock band, and he writes about them and learns some very valuable lessons about life.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the rock critic Lester Bangs, who wrote for Rolling Stone and who himself died a few years ago – also, like Hoffman, of a drug overdose. He befriends and mentors the young William Miller.

At one point, on a Saturday night, William is having a crisis, and he calls Lester Bangs.

Lester Bangs, the rock critic for Rolling Stone, is home – on a Saturday night. This shocks William. After all, someone like the great Lester Bangs should be out – shouldn’t he? 

“You’re home?” William says.

To which Lester Bangs responds: “I'm always home. I'm uncool.”

“So am I!” says William.

And then, Lester Bangs says the following: “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool.”

What does it mean to be cool? Let us turn to the source of all knowledge – Wikipedia.

“Cool was once an attitude fostered by rebels and underdogs, such as slaves, prisoners, bikers and political dissidents, etc., for whom open rebellion invited punishment, so it hid defiance behind a wall of ironic detachment, distancing itself from the source of authority rather than directly confronting it.”

Then, Wikipedia continues: “Someone who is cool is not constrained by the norms, expectations or beliefs of others.”

It seems to me that this definition – not constrained by the norms, expectations or beliefs of others – is a pretty good definition of what we Jews have been doing for the last 2500 years. 

Let us look at the great moments of Jewish cool.

It starts, of course, with Abraham. The coolest thing that Abraham ever did was to break his father's idols, when he was thirteen years old. (It's a legend. Don't bother looking for it in the Bible, though everyone is sure it's there).

And then, Moses: his coolest moment was when he confronted Pharaoh.

The coolest woman in the Bible? That would be Yael. In the book of Judges, Yael kills the Canaanite general Sisera by luring him into her tent and letting him think that he was going to get lucky that night.

King David? Not always that cool – in fact, there were many times when David was simply a manipulative jerk. The coolest moment in his life was when he brought the Ark into Jerusalem, and he was dancing with such utter joy that his robe went flying, which was not exactly dignified. David didn’t care. That was cool.

Who was the coolest Jewish philosopher? That would have been Baruch Spinoza, who lived in the 1600s in Amsterdam. Among other things, Spinoza publicly doubted that God had revealed the Torah. He believed that the Torah was only relevant in its ancient context. He publicly doubted that the Jews were the chosen people. He believed that everything was part of the same basic essence. For his trouble, the Jews of Amsterdam ostracized him and humiliated him. He suffered terribly, but he spoke his truth. He was the ultimate bad boy of Jewish history, the sort of kid that you want to hang out with but your parents won't allow it. Spinoza was cool.

The prize for the coolest Jewish movement goes to Zionism. Zionism meant that the Jews were no longer going to be dweebs. Zionism meant that the nations of the world were no longer going to bully us and steal our lunch money.

Jewish history is the history of being cool – because “someone who is cool is not constrained by the norms, expectations or beliefs of others.”

But there is something else as well that was in that dialogue from “Almost Famous.”

Remember what Lester Bangs said to his fellow uncool William Miller. “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool.”

Lester Bangs was saying that it takes courage to be uncool. It takes courage to be yourself. It takes courage to be vulnerable. It takes courage to be unafraid of what people are going to say about you.

And that kind of vulnerability with another person is, in the words of Lester Bangs, or in the words of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the only true currency in this bankrupt world.

When we are real with each other – that is the true currency.

So, here we are on Yom Kippur. The prayer book doesn't call this day Yom Kippur. It calls it Yom Ha-Kippurim — the day of atonements. Because there is a whole lot of atoning that we have to so.

But the ancient rabbis loved puns and word games. Yom Ha-Kippurim sounds like “a day like Purim.” How is Yom Kippur like Purim?

Because on Purim, we wear masks.

And on Yom Kippur, we acknowledge that we wear masks.

A mask like the one that Robin Williams wore — a mask of laughter that concealed the pain that he was feeling inside.

We never knew the pain that he was carrying inside. Why should we? Why did we need to? He knew it.

Robin Williams was by no means the only one who wore a mask.

You know what the Hebrew word for “face” is? Panim. If you know anything about Hebrew grammar, you will recognize that panim, the word for face, is in the plural. We have many faces that we show to the world.

Also, you should know that every time I type the word panim on my iPad, it comes out as “panic.” The face that we show to the world is not always, and perhaps not even often, the face that we show ourselves, and that can be a source of panic. The panim panic.

I want you to think about all the people walking around who wear masks. The masks are the masks of coolness, as if everything is going just great.

But behind the masks, watch out. In the words of the great Jewish thinker, Mrs. Rose Telushkin, the mother of Rabbi Joseph Telushkin: “The only happy people I know are people don't know well.”

It takes courage to be uncool. It takes courage to be home on a Saturday night. The most successful people in the world today are people who you just know were always home on Saturday nights: Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Probably even the late Steve Jobs.

So, perhaps a new definition of cool is: Cool is when you are so clear on who you really are that you don’t mind being uncool.

How blessed are those times when we find other people with whom we can be uncool. The people who are with us when life stinks, and when we are losing it all, and when we feel that we have just been caught with toilet paper on our shoe.

You know how people say: “I could have died when that happened”? There is no question about it. Embarrassment is like a little death, and blessed are the people who will be with us when we are embarrassed, or when we are self-conscious. Something within us has died, and they are not afraid to be around our temporary psychic corpses.

How cool to find those people who don't care how uncool you can be, the people with whom you can be vulnerable, the people with whom you can be real, the people you don't need to impress, the people who will cross the boundaries of their social circles and to befriend us even when we feel that we are totally unworthy.

We come before God today, ready to admit all of the uncool things that we have done — really uncool things. And God is the only one before Whom we stand who does not need us to be cool. In fact, God demands that we own up to our own uncoolness and to all of our inner brokenness.

In the presence of God, we do not have to be cool. Because God calls us just to be us, and just to be real.