Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

On Yom Kippur I spoke of the penetrating honesty of Judaism that does not flinch from the dark side of human nature. I referred to a book Renewed Each Day, Volumes I & II, published by Jewish Lights Publishing, (800) 962-4544 which I commend for your reading. My own article in three sections are reflections on the Jewish way to understand and overcome the roots of addiction.

Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav told of the king who received a disturbing report about the new harvest: "Whoever eats of the new crop will be driven mad. The king gathered his counselors and told them: "Since no other food is available, we must eat in order to live. There is nothing else that we can do. But at least let a few of us keep in mind that we are not mad."

It is not among the few that addiction has taken hold in our society. Addiction is not restricted to the poor or the uneducated or the black or the young or the disenfranchised. It is found as well among the affluent and the influential, the white and the mature, women and men. It is not isolated in the ghetto or barrio. Alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, or PCP--all are equal-opportunity employers.

Addiction is ecumenical. One out of ten Americans is addicted to some substance or another. The same figure applies to Jews. Tallit and tefillin are no talismans warding off addictive behavior.

Addiction in its multiple guises--the compulsions to gamble, to drink, to smoke, to take drugs, to overeat--is overwhelming. Something deeper than individual idiosyncratic behavior is involved.

What kind of people are we? What kind of culture have we established for our children and our children's children? What values do they take in with the air they breathe? Why do they hurt themselves, oblivious to the consequences? Why do they drink themselves blind, bludgeon their consciousnesses, rip up their flesh with needles, and ingest poisons into their systems? Why, when denied access to the substances, do they rob and steal and kill to support their habits?

My grandmother, no mean psychologist, would say: Nisht fun kein naches--"not from joy." These men, women, and children are in pain. They feel poor--and no trust or will or bank deposit can overcome their sense of impoverishment. They feel bored--and no cruise or vacation can overcome the nausea. They feel empty--and no amount of food can fill the vacuum. They feel worthless--and no number of titles and awards can raise their stature. They feel anxious, awkward, nervous--and no amount of liquor or drugs can overcome their self-doubts.

Why are they so many, and why do they come from all walks of life? Why are they so easily hurt, so quickly discouraged, so readily bored with living? They are raised in an enveloping hedonistic culture that prepares the soil for addiction. It is a mass culture rooted in an unstated theology, a popular system of belief more pervasive and more influential among more people than any of the established religions. And like every religion, it is a belief system that teaches what is real and what is phony, what gives meaning and what turns us off to life. Its presuppositions are summed up in its two imperatives: Pursue pleasure and avoid pain.

Hedonism is a system not boldly and publicly articulated these days but, nonetheless, widely and privately held. Hedonism presents itself as offering the unvarnished truth. Conventional preachments call for sacrifice, commitment, pain, and struggle to achieve salvation. Hedonism is neither moralistic nor hypocritical. It whispers to us that all the appeals to self-denial, altruism, idealism, commitment, and martyrdom are deceiving; that while these would have us believe that salvation is something rare, something hard, something to be received at some other time or place, hedonism tells us the naked truth: What we desire is pleasure now and the avoidance of all pain, and this is achievable.

Hedonistic wisdom promises liberation from a world of imperatives, duties, obligations. Flow with natural desires. Put aside your Bibles and Prayer Books. Live your life without sadness or sorrow or martyrdom or disappointment or defeat. Admit to yourself that hedonism is the desire and the end of salvation.

The hedonistic message seems to have a simple, sincere honesty. Who doesn't want pleasure? And who would not avoid pain? The pleasure of love and family and friendship; the pleasures of creativity and aesthetics. Hedonism gets to the core of our reality, our basic human needs, and cuts through the moralism and demands of traditional faiths.

But for all its claims to "tell it like it is," hedonism is seductively misleading and dangerously naive. Hedonism is the stuff that feeds the addictive personality. For, second thought makes it clear that nothing we want in our lives, nothing we regard as valuable, nothing of worth and significance can be gotten without pain, struggle, sacrifice, suffering.

What do we want and what is valuable in our lives? And what can be gained without suffering? Do we want to love and be loved?

He came to me, this man, with his doubts and asked in all seriousness, "How do I know if I love her?" I answered: "Are you willing to sacrifice for her sake, to suffer with her? If you answer 'yes,' it is a sign of love, but if you answer 'no,' it means that here there is no love." To love and be loved requires compatibility and compassion, from the Latin meaning "to bear, to suffer." Whoever loves a spouse, a child, a parent, a friend, opens himself or herself up to pain. Vulnerability is the price we pay for love's wonders. Does not to love and be loved by a child mean that there is never a moment as long as we live when we stop worrying about that child? To love and be loved by parents--those whose names we cry out in the black night when we are feverish and alone, parents who someday will cry out our name, reversing their parental roles with us--does not such love demand responsiveness, suffering, and reciprocity? No one can hurt us more than those we love.

And so with friendship. Can we have a friend or be a friend without offering some sacrifice of self? Where is friendship more truly tested than when deprivation and sacrifice is called for? Who will hear the confession of our errors and not condemn, who will contain our fears, who will add their blood to our own? Is there anything we want, anything that brings us joy, that is immune to suffering and pain?

And so with creativity. Can we write an essay, compose a song, paint a picture, play an instrument, run a race without pain?

Hedonism misrepresents real living. Against the illusions of hedonism, Judaism presents us with an unflinching Reality Principle. Cast out of the Garden of Eden into the real world, Eve is told by God the principle of life: "With pain and travail shalt thou bring forth children." No birth without sacrifice. In your blood, Eve, you give life to the world. And to Adam, God spoke reality: "In the seat of thy face shalt you eat bread till thou return into the ground, for out of the earth wast thou taken; for dust art thou and unto dust shalt thou return."

The myth opens the innocent eyes of Adam and Eve to the real world, east of Eden. Pain is the companion of birth. Pain is the companion of growth. The whole of life is nothing but the process of giving birth to oneself. To live and to love, to create and to work, one must be willing to suffer. One must be willing to rip thorns and thistles from the earth's growth and wrestle with God's angels and rise up limping lame. To give birth to your own self is to endure anguish. Life is filled with births and deaths, with attachments and separations.

So hedonism couples two ideas--the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain--that turn out to be contradictory. Jewish wisdom knows that spiritual, cultural, aesthetic, creative pleasures cannot be achieved without pain.

When hedonism is caught in the lie, it holds out a heavier dose of enticements. If the pleasures we seek are too painful to accomplish, if it requires too great an effort to master a talent or to transform the perverseness of society, if the desire of our hearts is too high or too heavy to achieve, then drop them for pleasures that come without pain. If love requires commitment, if the struggle involves blood, sweat, and tears, then let go of the ideals. Relax, play it cool, don't let things bug you. Take the short cut, grab hold of easy, quick, immediate sensations. Eat, drink, suck the juices of easy joy. Feed the body. There is pleasure enough in good food, good wine, good sex. If the self aspires to higher things, redefine your self.

From infancy we are raised to fear pain, to stop the headache instantly. And we have found the cure, the technological panacea. Open up the sacred chest--medicine cabinet--the Aron Kodesh of our homes, and behold a pharmacopeia of potions and pills promising salvation. Amphetamines and barbiturates, stimulants and sedatives: "Cause us Adonai to lie down in peace and raise us up again unto life." Thy miracles are daily with us, "evening, morn, and noon."

As we pressure the pharmacist for soporifics, we pressure our religious institutions and leaders to write quick prescriptions, easy answers, ritual routines that will help us escape from the pains of life. Prescriptions and proscriptions faithfully followed by rote will help us avoid the exertions of thinking, the wrestlings of conscience, the struggles to create convictions out of ambiguities.

The addict comes in many forms. Gambler, overeater, alcoholic, sexaholic, drugaholic, workaholic, cultaholic. But in all, there is an underlying desire to escape reality, its ambiguities, conflicts, and cruelties. By pouring oneself into a single activity or obsession, the addict hopes to block out the world.

A word about the workaholic, the most acceptable addict in our culture. The person addictively drawn to something vaguely called "career," whose compulsion may be called "upward mobility" is no less escapist than the substance abuser. She is as dependent as the others. She is drunk with mirthless sobriety. He is intoxicated with the cold efficiency of the computer. He seeks escape from the affective world of personal relationships. She mocks at community service, at everything that cannot be summed up with the bottom line. She has no time or room for poetry or philosophy or religion or family or friends. The workaholic has no time and no interest in the struggle for ideals or idealism or personal service. He will pay someone else to meditate for him, to parent for him, or to engage the world for him. Annoyed, he will cheerlessly write out a check to avoid the pain of involvement. Only let him alone to feed his accounts.

Hedonism is the religion of our mass culture. Hedonism is an idolatry. The addict is an idolater who has found his small gods and has blocked out the larger God. He has chosen his compulsions and denied his freedom. She has consciously decided not to live. Afraid of pain, she had deadened her sensibilities. Fearful of dependence and the responsibilities and pains it entails, she has become dependent on something or someone other and less than self.

Hedonism lies to us. It insists that all we want out of life is the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain. But that is untrue. Who would allow a frontal lobotomy to be performed on himself, an incision severing nerve fibers in the brain, which would deaden all pains, all fears, all concerns? Who of us would allow the implantation of electrodes connected to the pleasure centers of the brain, bombarding us with ceaseless pleasures, requiring from us no struggle, providing a life of immediate and constant gratification until we die by exhaustion?

We would not choose to be chained to a pleasure machine devoid of pain because a life without aspiration, ideals, or purpose is euthanasia. To live is to know that you are mandated, that there is something significant that you must do, something purposive that offers meaning in your life and therefore something deserving of your suffering. To be alive is to know that you are a child of imperatives. As Micah summed it up, "It has been told thee what is good and what is required of you: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." None of these imperatives can be realized without struggle, pain, and sacrifice.

Therein lies human dignity, self-respect, and meaning. No one chooses suffering for its own sake. We choose life and love and peace and justice. But no one can truthfully choose those ennobling ideals without embracing struggle as well. Therefore wisdom counsels: See to it that what you live for is worthy of sacrifice. Only the dead have no imperatives, no mitzvoth. As the Talmud puts it, "When a person dies. that person is freed from Torah and mitzvoth, from study and deeds of goodness" (Shabbat 30a). The dead are beyond pain and beyond life.

We Jews do not seek pain. There is no masochism in our tradition. But we know that to feel no pain is to court disaster. Not to feel pain is far more dangerous than to feel pain.

We live in a culture founded on a dangerously false understanding of reality, one that prepares the ground for addiction. Its lure is a painless life, but its price is death.

This pain-avoiding hedonistic culture has affected the upbringing of our children. When parents will not allow children to visit the sick relative in the hospital or attend the funeral of their grandmother lest they see human beings cry or mourn their loss, they rob the children of their humanity and prepare them for the perpetual search for painkillers. Their character is spoiled in parental overprotection that reduces life to the avoidance of unpleasantness and the pursuit of proximate pleasure.

Hedonism whispers, "Choose, please." Judaism advises, "Choose life." The two are not synonymous. We must not deprive ourselves or our children of the right to struggle, the capacity to suffer, the courage to endure pain, or the mandate to afflict our souls. To be Jewish is to prepare to struggle, to combat those who step on the throats of the innocent, to love and care for each other. To be Jewish is to bear with dignity the scars and blemishes that give meaning to our lives.

Hedonism has nothing to live for--only a life to avoid. In heroin, heroism is denied.

It is not enough to tell our children to "just say no." They will not say "no" to drugs and not go back on their word until they learn to say "yes" to life. And to say "yes" to life is to say "yes" to the pain and struggle and sacrifice without which no ideal can be touched. God is called "the life of the universe." Alive, God too feels and suffers and is afflicted in our afflictions. "For a long time I have kept silence, I have kept still and restrained Myself; now I will cry out like a woman in travail, I will gasp and pain" (Isaiah 42:14). As God lives, we are alive. As God lives and struggles, so must we who would live.

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