Ladies and Gentlemen, please take your seats as soon as possible. I'd like to call this first session of the annual shareholders meeting of Reform Judaism, Inc., New City franchise, to order.

Even though we're not in finance or industry, this is our annual shareholders meeting, you know. It is our biggest yearly gathering, the one at which we review our past performance and plan for future production. We're here to take care of business, and I'd like to explore various facets of that business in this year's High Holyday sermons.

We've gathered at this meeting tonight for many different reasons. Some are here out of conviction, some due to coercion. Some are here out of joy, some out of guilt. Some are here with their children and grandchildren, perhaps in order to keep tabs on their investments. Some have even come here in hopes of meeting their bashert, their soul-mate. Trust me, I know from personal experience: it does happen.

There are so many agendas, so many different reasons for coming together tonight. Might it be better if we all shared a common goal? In some ways, perhaps. But in one way that is crucially important, our own growth as individuals, quite the opposite is preferable. Especially tonight, I think having your own personal agenda for being here is fine.

As a matter of fact, I want to reinforce just that: I want to ask you to be selfish. Yes, selfish. I want you to satisfy your agenda, not anyone else's. I want to ask all of us to mind our own business, not in the sense of not being nosey (though that would be a good idea, also), but rather in the sense of taking care of ourselves and our own needs for a change. For the next few minutes, let's explore what our Jewish "product line" offers to help us do that.

One of the reasons we're here tonight is because we need to celebrate. We need to be swept up, up, and away by the peak moments of our lives, and come down to earth later with a sigh, totally satisfied, fully spent. And we'd like this to happen as much of the time as possible.

Deep in our hearts we agree with Lucy in the PEANUTS cartoons when she says, "I don't want ups and downs. I want ups and ups and ups!" [King's Computer Treasury of Dynamic Humor, 1990, King Duncan, Seven Worlds Pub. ]

But far too often we don't know how to really celebrate the ups. Oh, we know how to party, but we don't know how to celebrate in a way that leaves us fully satisfied. As Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People puts it,

The parents of a 13-year-old boy or girl… plan the Bar Mitzvah, and… they want to celebrate... And they don't know how. So for the Bar (or Bat) Mitzvah they plan a party, and maybe it has a football theme or a soccer theme or a ballerina theme. But there is nothing about a child taking his or her first steps into adolescent responsibility. There is nothing about the moral demands that young person will soon be facing, and how the parents feel about letting their child enter that world without them. There is nothing about the parents standing on the threshold of middle age, now that they have a teenager ( and nothing will age a parent faster than that), and depending on this child for their immortality… And when it is over, there are a lot of presents to sort out and a lot of bills to pay and a lot of people saying "we had a wonderful time," but there is no sense that a once-in-a-lifetime transition has just taken place. [Harold Kushner, The American Rabbi, Fall, 1999, pp. 6-7.]

Why not? Because we let ourselves get distracted by things that are inconsequential. You know as well as I do that if you get in the way of a mother and daughter on their hunt for THE DRESS, you take your life in your hands. If we don't yet know how to really celebrate we need the same thing that's needed to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice. We need to practice focusing on the important values involved in our celebrations, practice focusing on the core rather than the superficial periphery. That would produce a sense of satisfaction with our celebrations far beyond anything most of us experience now.

We also need to teach the same thing to our children. Don't be like the man who asked my wife, Marian, on the morning of his son's Bar Mitzvah, where the sanctuary was, because he'd never been in it before. You're well aware that our children learn by example. Show them the check you wrote in honor of their Bar or Bat Mitzvah to help feed the poor - a check for three percent of the cost of the extravaganza you've just thrown made out to Mazon, the Jewish response to hunger. If you do, the lesson will pay off in dividends you can't begin to calculate.

Will you feel a deep sense of celebration if six or seven years from now, instead of asking you to fund a trip to go play in the Bahamas over Spring break, your son or daughter asks you to help with plane-fare to go work on a kibbutz or on an Indian reservation helping underprivileged kids learn how to read? You certainly will.

Minding our own business, meeting our own needs, is also a matter of perspective, and ours is often way off the mark. Much too much of our sense of who we are revolves around how much money we have amassed. But no matter how much it is, we don't think we ever have enough. In a study conducted by investment managers Neuberger and Bergman, "rich" was defined as having between $1 and $5 million in assets. Yet more than half of the people who actually were in that category, some fifty-five percent of the people interviewed, didn't consider themselves wealthy. [USA Today, 11/11/91, p. D1.]

Nor does the having, no matter how much, really satisfy us:

… [there are]studies indicating that dissatisfaction with one's income and one's life actually increase as income levels go up - meaning, incredibly, that, on average, the more money we make the less happy we are.

… the London School of Economics… created a happiness index based on degrees of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with aspects of our lives. Utilizing this happiness index, and applying it internationally, the study found that, of the countries of the world, the United States ranks 46th in happiness, well below much poorer countries like Bangladesh, Ghana, Latvia, Estonia and the Dominican Republic. [F. James Levinson, The American Rabbi, Spring/Summer 2000, pp. 248-9.]

What we need to remember is that money will make us happy not if we simply have it, but only if we use it to produce good. One of the best feelings in the world is using our money to help others. It produces a sense of satisfaction far beyond anything we feel looking at the bottom line of our portfolios.

One of the best stories I've heard about putting things back into a more healthy perspective concerns…

An American investment banker [who] was at the pier of a coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, "Only a little while."

The American then asked why he didn't stay out longer and catch more fish.

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's needs.

The American then asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

The fisherman replied, "I sleep late, play with my children in the hills and the valleys, go to the Basilica, take a siesta with my wife Maria, and then sip wine and play the guitar with my amigos."

The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and I can help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you could sell directly to the processor, and eventually open your own cannery. You would then control the product, the processing and the distribution. You then could leave this small fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles, and eventually New York City from where you would run your expanding enterprise.

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But how long will this all take?"

To which the banker replied, " Fifteen to twenty years."

"But then what?" asked the fisherman.

The American laughed and said, "That's the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO [Initial Public Offering] and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions."

"Millions?" repeated the fisherman "Then what?"

"Well," said the banker after a moment's pause, "Then you could retire to a small fishing village where you could sleep late, play with your children in the hills and valleys, go to the Basilica, take a siesta with your wife Maria, and sip wine and play the guitar with your amigos." [F. James Levinson, The American Rabbi, Spring/Summer 2000, pp. 249-50.]

Lastly, one of things we need is a sense of belonging. We need a sense of community. We need to be part of something. Study after study shows that this is desired by huge percentages of people in industrialized countries like ours. We need an antidote to the dog-eat-dog life many of us lead in our pursuit of the almighty dollar.

One of the things I've always found very strange is that we Jews already have exactly what most people are looking for: something to belong to. My colleague Rabbi Jack Riemer speaks about a very strange Midrash that says:

"You… the Jewish people--are called Adam (a person), and the other people in the world are not called Adam."

What a dreadful statement! Only Jews are humans and other people are not human? How can our tradition say that… How can the midrash say such a terrible thing?

[Because] …it does NOT say that Jews are BINEY Adam and others are not, that we are the descendants of Adam and other people are not. If it said that, it would indeed be a racist statement…What it says is: we are Adam, not biney Adam, but [an] Adam; we are a [single] human being… Jews the world over are one person… Just as if a person hurts in any part of his body, his whole body is affected, so if any Jew, anywhere in the world, is in pain, the pain is felt by Jews everywhere, even thousands of miles away. No other people that is scattered throughout the world has this kind of sensitivity for one another. [No other group has this kind of belonging.] [Jack Reimer, Torah Fax, June, 2000.]

Are we so blind that we don't see what's right in front of our faces? No, not blind, just afraid. From birth, American culture teaches us to be a Lone Ranger, strong, self-sufficient, beholden to no one. Friends, it's a lie. Why not learn instead from the Judaism that reminds us over and over again that each Jew is indeed responsible for every other Jew? Then we can begin to meet our need for belonging.

To bring this particular session of our shareholder's meeting to a close, I would share with you one final report about a candidate in an executive training program…

...a son [who] lived in the castle of his father, the king. One day the young prince went to his father and asked to go traveling into the world to discover his fate.. The young man traveled deep into the forest…Soon a huge, moaning giantess who was missing half her body, limped over a hill. She dragged herself to the water's edge and drank and drank the water until the lake was dry…. She beat the earth with her fists and thundered, "THERE IS NOT ENOUGH!! MY THIRST IS UNQUENCHED!!" The ground shook with her pounding and wailing. Finally, she exhausted herself and slept. When she awoke, she dragged herself back the way she had come.

The prince followed her at a distance. She led him to her castle and the young man hid and spied on her. She lit a fire under an enormous cauldron in front of the drawbridge. The incomplete, but powerful giantess saw a herd of buffalo wander by the castle and she scooped up a dozen of them in her huge hands, tore them limb from limb, and threw them into her cauldron. A flock of geese flew overhead. The half-giantess reached up and caught a dozen geese, tore them to shreds, and threw them into her cauldron. Then she added a hundred bags of flour, barley, peas, and oats. While the stew cooked, the giantess went in the castle…

Meanwhile, the son of the king was hidden in a tree near the cauldron. When the giantess left, he speared a piece of meat for himself and his dog, then hid himself again in the branches of the tree. When the half-giantess returned, she tipped the cauldron to her mouth and swallowed the entire stew. She looked at the bottom of the pot and began to scream, "THERE IS NOT ENOUGH!" She raged, breathed fire, and stomped the ground. After a time of ranting and raving, the half-giantess exhausted herself and, once again, she slept. As she slept, the prince made a stealthy, speedy retreat. He rode back… to his father's castle... and right up to the king's throne… The king, amazed at the changes in his son, rushed to embrace him. At his father's touch, the son said, "Father, I have seen life."[King Duncan, Dynamic Preaching, Oct./Nov./Dec., 1997.]

That's the life that so many of us have seen, also, the way far too many of us are living: incomplete and never satisfied. May this be the year that we learn from the millennial wisdom of our people how to meet our real needs: our need for celebration, our need for perspective, and our need for belonging. May this be the year that we do indeed mind our own business.

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