Kol Nidre (Yom Kippur) 5780/2019
Emily Zamourka’s piercing soprano voice ricocheted off the concrete walls of the Koreatown subway station. The homeless woman singing stood by herself near the end of the platform, holding a slew of hole-punctured bags on one arm and lugging a cart draped with a blanket on the other. She wore a floor-length denim skirt, her hair in girlish blond pigtails. The station was empty. It looked as though this homeless woman was alone on her stage, commanding the attention of an unseen audience as she sent Giacomo Puccini’s Italian aria “O Mio Babino Caro” careening down the tunnel. An LAPD officer captured the performance on video.The post to the LAPD website garnered a half million viewers.
Emily grew up in Moldova, where she studied classical piano and violin. She never had voice lessons, but as a child, she loved to sing along with operas on the television. At 22, Emily emigrated to the United States with her parents, seeking and receiving political asylum. She had a good life. By the early 2000s, she had moved to Vancouver, Washington, and rediscovered music, teaching piano to about 60 students.
In 2008, her liver and pancreas began to fail. She moved to Los Angeles for treatment. When she recovered, she was struggling with massive medical bills. She returned to teaching music but could not find enough students to cover her expenses. She began taking odd jobs and playing the violin on the streets for extra cash. Someone stole her violin. She fell behind on rent, was evicted, and ended up homeless — sleeping on cardboard as a mattress in a parking lot. Without an instrument, she performed for subway commuters with something that can’t be stolen from her: her enchanting voice.
The offers of help came pouring in once the video was posted. A city council member tracked her down and offered her the chance to perform at the opening of the new Little Italy District in Los Angeles. She did, just this past Saturday night. She was offered a recording deal. People called offering their violins, and to help her find a job or housing. Two go-fund-me pages have raised over $100,000. All this in just one week.
On the LAPD website, the comment below the video reads: “4 million stories. 4 million voices. Sometimes you just have to stop and listen to one, to hear something beautiful.” That’s all it took to change Emily Zamourka’s life: one individual, officer Alex Frazier, who stopped to listen. Plenty of others had rushed by many times before. Some hurried past, their thoughts occupied by other matters. Some blocked out Emily’s voice with the music in their headphones or had their eyes transfixed to their phone screens. Some only saw a homeless person and were repelled. Others dropped small coins for her as they rushed by.
Only Officer Frazier stopped to listen. Only Officer Frazier took the time to hear this woman’s special gift and help her share it with the world. His one act of kindness set off a cascade of others.
??? Chesed – kindness – is one of the most foundational principles within Judaism. In Pirke Avot, we learn that the world rests upon three things: Torah, Worship, and Kindness. Our sages also teach that the Torah begins with kindness – when God clothes Adam and Eve – and ends with kindness – when God buries Moses – and everything in between is, in essence, kindness.
Many of our heroes in the Bible are models of kindness: Abraham offers hospitality. Rebecca offers water to Eliezer and his camels. Shifra and Puah, the Hebrew midwives, risk their lives to spare the newborn males. Ruth refuses to leave the side of her grieving mother-in-law, Naomi.
Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai taught that after the Temple’s destruction, acts of kindness achieve atonement for us in place of sacrifice.
Today, on Yom Kippur, as on every festival, we recite God’s thirteen attributes. But among all of God’s qualities, when the Rabbis teach that we should emulate God, it is his kindness they bid us replicate.
In Psalms, we read ???? ??? ???? olam chesed yibaneh, which means either “the world was built out of kindness,” or “the world will be built out of kindness.” Both are true. If not for God’s kindness, our world would not exist. Only with human kindness will the ???? ???? tikkun olam – repair – occur that is necessary for the world to be redeemed.
On Erev Rosh Hashanah, I shared the words of Henry James, who said, “the three most important things in life are: “be kind, be kind and be kind.” But what does it mean to be kind? We would all readily answer that to be kind means to hold the door for someone, feed a stray cat, comfort a loved one after a bad day at work or school. These are all acts of kindness. But I want to suggest to you tonight that kindness itself is something more. Kindness is not just doing a kind thing. Kindness is a state of being and a way of relating to our world and those around us.
Angela Santomero, the author of the book Radical Kindness, suggests that “kindness is seeing with one’s heart, rather than with one’s head, which leads to interacting with others with compassion, rather than misunderstanding them.”
To see with the heart is to see what is invisible to the eye.
To see with the heart is to see through a lens of “trust, respect, love, patience, and warmth.”
To see with the heart means to assume the best of everyone, “whether it is a family member, friend, stranger, panhandler, someone with opposing political views or a loudmouth on a cell phone in a hushed coffee shop.”
To see with the heart is to know that you cannot possibly know the whole story of someone else’s life.
In Santomero’s words, “That rude waiter? Well, you don’t know what kind of day he has been having. Maybe someone was unkind to him. Maybe dozens of people were, and he just wants to go home.”
Tracy Bennet was trying to check out at Costco with her two children ages 2 and 7 in tow when she discovered she didn’t have her membership card. She hopped into the customer service line and kept her kids occupied. They were fine for a while. But the line was not moving, and she sensed one child was edging toward a meltdown. She quickly downloaded the Costco app on her phone so that she could show her membership number and get out. She texted her husband for the username and password. That’s when she was mom-shamed by a man walking by who yelled at her, “You see these babies? They fuss like that because they want your attention. Maybe you should get off your phone and give them your attention!”
In a twitter post, Tracy wrote to the man: “I ran out of tricks, and my kids ran out of patience, and now my goal was to just get us out of this line as quickly as possible before they released the Kraken. But thank you for your parenting advice. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to shame a young mother with two tiny children. Thank you for seeing a stressful moment and deciding, ‘I think I’ll make this worse for her.'”
She went on to say: “Everyone, if you see a mother (or father) with young children out in public anywhere, assume she is stressed out. Assume she is trying her damndest to get through the situation. Assume this is the very last place she wants to be. Assume she’d rather be home cuddling, playing, running around with her babies. Assume she probably has had no sleep since her first child was born. Assume she is hungry because her toddler decided he wanted extra eggs this morning, so she gave him her breakfast in addition to her own. And if you have nothing kind or supportive to offer her, please mind your own business.”
If only that man had seen with his heart instead of his head. Dr. Wayne Dyer teaches, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” I’ll say that again. “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” At that moment, as the heart fully comprehends, kindness flows out of us naturally. We don’t have to think about it. We don’t have to try. We don’t have to choose. It flows from us because we understand. Think about how different that encounter might have been.
My dear friend and colleague, Rabbi David Greenspoon, shared with me a beautiful letter from a four-year-olds’ teacher in his preschool. She wrote:
“Well, today, a great act of kindness occurred! All of the kids use their feet for mobility while Zoey scoots from activity to activity. No one has ever said anything about this, its never been pointed out, and yet today, while moving from one activity to the next, one of the friends decided to scoot from activity to activity with Zoey. The smile on Zoey’s face was priceless. This led to the idea that maybe we should ask Zoey if she would like to have a scooting race with all the other kids. She said yes and was grinning from ear to ear! We decided that Zoey and the student who inspired this were going to lead the troops to the playground… Scooting in pairs down the hallway together… she was beaming, and so were they!”
That student who first scooted on the floor with Zoey was able to see with her heart. The most beautiful thing of all is that – just as for these four-year-olds, so for all of us – when we see with our heart, we not only put a smile on the other person’s face, we put a smile on our face as well. Living a life of kindness lowers our stress, raises our sense of satisfaction and inner peace, and fills us with joy.
The question is: If it feels so good to be kind, why aren’t we, all the time? Emily Zamourka, our opera singer from the subway station, essentially asks us the same question. In an interview with USA Today, she expressed her gratitude for the tremendous outpouring of love she experienced this past week. But she also offered a word of admonition:
She said: “I am so grateful. But I also wish that the kindness I am experiencing now, I might have felt when no one knew of my singing. Some people – because of my appearance and being homeless – were not treating me kindly,” she said. “Everyone deserves to be treated nicely. It’s a great feeling, and it will make a better world.”
Well, one answer might be that we are not as nice as we think we are. No, really! That was the conclusion of a study conducted by psychologists at Goldsmiths University in London. Among those surveyed, 98% thought they were among the nicest 50% of the population. That is just not statistically possible!
The survey also listed a series of acts of kindness and asked which ones the respondents often do or do whenever they can. The list included items like giving directions to a stranger, holding the door or elevator for a stranger, donating money to charity, helping someone cross the road, giving your seat on a bus or train to an older adult or pregnant woman. More than half of those who rated themselves as the second-highest level of nice checked off less kind deeds from the list than were checked off on average by all the others. Imagine that!
So if we recognize that we could be more kind, that we could learn better to see with our heart, how do we do that? Angela Santomero has some advice for us about that.
First, pause. Nothing good ever comes of reacting too quickly. Give your heart time to process what you see.
Take a breath and smile, even if you don’t think you want to. It’s amazing the effect the physical act of smiling has on our mental and emotional state.
Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Would you want your overtired mother to have to work overtime on the night shift at the hospital when she desperately needs a good night’s sleep? Would you want your son working for minimum wage in a job where he goes unnoticed and unappreciated? That woman who cut in line, could it be she has an elderly parent at home, and she is worried about leaving them alone? That employee who came in late, is it possible he had to deal with a family crisis or had trouble getting his kids off to school?
Work on developing your “kindness muscles.” Practice choosing kindness over criticism or animosity, choosing to empower rather than to control, choosing to love rather than to judge.
Watch others who see with their hearts. Learn from their kindness and seek to emulate them.
Remember the words of Hillel: What is hurtful to you do not do to others. When you see or experience negative behavior, learn from it to do the opposite. The Indian Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda taught, “Let the ugliness of unkindness to others impel me to make myself beautiful with lovingkindness. May harsh speech from my companions remind me to use sweet words always. If stones from evil minds are cast at me, let me send in return only missiles of goodwill.”
Finally, before you can see others with your heart, you must be able to see yourself with your heart.
Sunday night, Erev Rosh Hashanah, I also talked about the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, which Rabbi Akiva taught is the most fundamental commandment in the Torah. The verse says “as yourself” because you cannot love your neighbor until you have first learned to love yourself.
All Yom Kippur long, we will confess our sins. But did you know that we are also supposed to confess our goodness? Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook taught:
“A person should also be joyous concerning the good he or she has done. Therefore, just as there is a great value to the repair of the soul by the confession of sins… there is also a great value to the confession of mitzvot, positive deeds, in order to gladden the heart and strengthen the path of life in the way of God.”
In other words, recounting the good we have done inspires and motivates us to be even better.
The 14th century Persian mystic and poet, Hefez wrote, “I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.” If only we could appreciate our own light, we might try to shine it more into our world. So even as you focus this day on all that you have done wrong in the past year, also take the time to focus on what you have done right
This week, two Arab plumbers went to repair a leak in the home of Rosa Meir in Haifa. When they got there, they saw a large blast of water and started fixing it. At some point, one of the brothers started talking with Rosa about her life. He learned that she was 95 years old and a Holocaust survivor. He told the Times of Israel this week that “her story touched my heart. I decided I would not take a cent from her.” After the work was completed, he removed his notepad to bill her, and he wrote the following: “Holocaust survivor, may you have health until 120 years old. From Matari Simon and Matari Salim. The normal bill for the job they did is 1000 shekels, about 285 dollars. But he wrote on the note that the cost was 0 shekels. Not only that, they told her to call for any other repairs that she needed at any time and they would fix it for free. Rosa was brought to tears.
That, my friends, is truly seeing with one’s heart. May we learn to always see with our hearts. May we learn not just to do kind acts but to be kind. Not to some people, but to all people, even ourselves. Not some of the time, but all of the time.
As the Dalai Lama taught: “Be kind whenever possible.” And then he would add: “It is always possible.”