Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

Every year, I peer into my soul and await a revelation on what to speak about for the Jewish New Year known as Rosh HaShanah. Images and ideas create a pathway that I follow. Before being able to speak before a large community, I try to first speak to myself. Every drasha is in a sense, an autobiography of the writer. Here are some ruminations that some of you might be able to relate to, for the road that we have yet to travel.

Rosh HaShanah celebrates the birthday of one person.

Talmudic and Midrashic wisdom teaches us about the worth of a single person; he who saves one human being, saves an entire world.” The impact of one person, though arithmetically small, is capable of moving and changing human history. Rosh Hashanah celebrates the birth of one man, who justifies the existence of an entire cosmos—Adam.

Maimonides wrote in his Hilchot Teshuva, a most remarkable idea that underscores this significant point.

Each person should regard himself throughout the year as though he were half-innocent and half-guilty and should regard the rest of humankind as half-innocent and half-guilty. If one sins, he endangers the fate of the entire world; if he acts virtuously, he brings salvation and deliverance to the entire planet. One person can save a world.

We have often heard how powerless one person is to shape and direct the course of human history. Today many of us look at the events around the world and feel utterly helpless. Many of us ask the questions: What difference can I make? What can I do to make a difference? Perhaps more precisely: does our existence in this world really matter at all? Could Shakespeare be correct when uses Macbeth to express:

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28

The feeling of powerlessness and futility is often seen around election time. The real reason why thousands of people never bother to vote is because they resign themselves to the belief that their vote will never make a difference. Most of us can recall how in one presidential election, Bush, as we know, lost the popular election, only to win the Electoral College by just a handful of votes. If Gore wins the election, there is no Iraqi War; history certainly would have followed a different trajectory.

Maimonides adds a flip side to his equation. Just as one person can save the world, so too can one person threaten to destroy it. Was Maimonides simply using hyperbole to illustrate his point? I believe he was being quite literal—in ways that he could scarcely imagine.

On November 8, 1923, the leaders of the insignificant Nazi party met in a Munich tavern and elected Adolf Hitler as their leader by a margin of one vote. What disastrous world war might have been averted if that group had elected a different man!

Human history has often been determined by individuals who used their power either constructively, or destructively. When the Mongolian army of Genghis Khan went through all of Asia and Russia, no army could hope to stand up to the vastly superior Mongolian armies, who fought a modern-style war in a medieval age. The Russians, Poles, Hungarians all fell before the Mongolian hoards; Genghis Khan slaughtered every inhabitant he encountered.

If Genghis Khan enters Rome, the Roman Catholic Church would have been destroyed; if he enters Paris, the intellectual capital of Europe would have been completely decimated; had Rome fallen to the Mongols, the artistic and classical legacies to the ancient past would have disappeared forever. Without the classical artworks of the past to inspire them, would Dante, Michelangelo, or Leonardo have done? A Mongolian destruction would have prevented the age of the Renaissance; human civilization would have come to a dramatic end as we now know it; nor would there have been a Reformation or Scientific Revolution.

Yet, none of these probable scenarios ever came to past. Why? You see, as the Mongolians were about to pass through the heart of Western civilization in Vienna, the death of Genghis Khan’s father had suddenly died. Mongolian custom demanded that all Mongolians return to the homeland and choose a new khan (leader). Fortunately for the West, the Mongolians remained where they were and intermingled with the Chinese and disappeared from history.

One man’s death changes history. From this example, we can see just how great the power of one person can irrevocably alter human history.

BUT CAN WE REALLY CHANGE HISTORY?

You could argue: That’s fine and good if you happen to be the head of a State; but what about the ordinary person? What difference can the man in the street possibly make?

Actually, it’s all about the power of belief. If you believe you are important and significant, if you believe that your existence is not some cosmic accident, if you believe that you have a purpose and a destiny, then you can indeed make that decision to not only better yourself, but also the community around you.

HILLEL’S ANTIDOTE TO THE “GRASSHOPPER COMPLEX”

About 2000 years ago, Hillel’s stressed that each person makes a difference in the entire world. Hillel’s famous dictum, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?” “If I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” stresses this eternal truth. We exist in the here and now, and God calls upon us to make a positive contribution in bettering ourselves and our communities.

A good illustration from the Torah captures this timeless truth. In the Book of Numbers, when Moses sent the spies to inspect the land of Israel, they spoke of their inability to conquer the land. They felt powerless against the inhabitants and wished to go back to Egypt where they would spend the rest of their lives as slaves.

The people we saw there were of enormous size. We saw giants there too ( . . . We felt like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to in their eyes.”

There is a metaphor that best describes the spies attitude is known as akridosis. In modern English, that is the grasshopper syndrome, and the term stems from the Greek akris (grasshopper or locust). It is a classic Yiddishe disease. If you see yourself as a grasshopper, why shouldn’t others see you the same also?

In biblical times, the prophet Isaiah refers to the pagan King Cyrus of Persia, as “My Messiah,” for he would restore the Jewish people back to their ancestral homeland, after the Babylonians had expelled them over a century earlier. We may deduce that if a pagan monarch can serve as a Messiah, in terms of his redemptive role, we can all play a similar “messianic role” in bettering our families and communities.

Really, when you think about it, the entire Bible is about singular individuals who believed they could make a difference in the world around them. Whether it be a Abraham, an Isaac, or Jacob, or Joseph, or a Miriam and Moses, each of these individuals made a commitment, never realizing that a single soul would ever be aware of what they were doing or how they would be remembered by posterity.

This is not just true of biblical personalities; it is no less with modern heroes and heroines of the human spirit, e.g., those pious Christians like Oscar Schindler, who made the moral choice to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust—even if it meant certain death for defying Nazi orders.

The same may be said of another man’s vision—Theodore Herzl inspires a new generation of Jews to realize a dream that Jews for centuries had long given up—a return to their ancestral homeland. When we stand together as a community, united and strong—there was nothing they couldn’t achieve. The founding fathers and mothers of Israel demonstrated how a united people could indeed triumph over the Many. The ability to see themselves as powerful and capable is precisely what enabled the State of Israel to out-survive all the negative prognosticators, who believed that the fledgling state would never survive its first year.

Israelis survived because they understood the Power of One.

Our own community may yet serve as another example; although we are a small congregation, as I mentioned this past Shabbat, the greatness of a person is never in its physical size, but in its heart and soul. Earlier we mentioned how Maimonides pointed out earlier, every person is capable of bettering the world; but the process of change must really begin first with ourselves. Rosh Hashanah affords us the opportunity to recalibrate our souls. . .

Before we start tackling the real problems of our world, during this season we need to focus more inwardly instead. In what is perhaps his most famous aphorism, Rabbi Salanter wrote about the challenges of change:

When I was young I wanted to change the world and solve its problems, As I got older I realized that perhaps I should lower my sights, I thought I would be better served in changing my country as time went on I realized that people of country could not be changed. I decided to change the people of my town , but they also did not wish to change, When as I reached my old age I thought I would try changing my family, here also I found my endeavors go to waste, try as I might my family members would not change.

Now that I am on my death bed, I have realized that if I had sought to improve myself, and removed my own defects, then, perhaps my family members might have been influenced. Then seeing the behavior of my family, people of my town would have been influenced. By seeing the spiritual change and improvement of the people of my town, the people of my country would have been influenced. And perhaps through the people of my country, the world may have been influenced.”

Herein lies the genius of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippor, rather than changing the world from the outside looking in, we begin by changing our inner world from inside looking out. Never underestimate the power of One; if properly unleashed, the power of One can improve your personal life, your family, your community, your country, and ultimately—the world itself.

Dear friends, we are living in extraordinary times. Record numbers of people are unemployed; the social conditions of our world are becoming perilously more dangerous on a daily basis. Our leaders are confused; and so are we . . . many of us are just a pay check away from living on the streets. We can choose to make a difference of the kind of world we wish to co-create. We can create a world of scarcity or a world of abundance; we can create a world of despair, or a world of hopefulness. As the Rosh Hashanah liturgy stresses, the Books of Life and Death are written by our own hand, therefore on this Rosh Hashanah, let us make the wise decision to choose life for all.