Yom Kippur Kol Nidre

Rabbi Michael Friedland
Kol Nidre Yom Kippur 2008

The story is told of a peasant, a wicked peasant, an anti-Semite who hated Jews and any opportunity he had to ridicule them he would.  He would persecute them and mock them.  In fact, his whole life was a collection of evil acts. He hardly did anything redeeming.  And it was one Friday afternoon when a wagon-load of Jews was traveling in the forest not far from his field  and the wagon was stuck in the mud, in the muck, and it couldn’t be extricated.  The Jews got out of the wagon and began to tug at the horses and push at the wagon and the more they pushed, and the greater their effort, the deeper entrapped was the wagon.
The peasant farmer stood on the side laughing and mocking the Jews and cursing them.  And then, finally, after a while he chased away the Jews; and he unhitched the horses and latched himself to the wagon.  And with one great heave he pulled the wagon out of the mud.  He cursed the Jews again, but they got onto the wagon and traveled back to their destination and arrived in time for Shabbat.
When this evil peasant died, those special angels that are assigned, not to the pearly gates, but I guess are assigned to the fiery gates, were delighted to see this soul arrive because they knew that here was a bona fide
candidate for perdition , for destruction, for the furnaces, for the fire.
And with great fanfare, with  a 20 piece band, they ushered them toward the fiery gates.  Just as he was about to be thrown into the burning furnace a voice was heard and a tiny little angel shouted out from a distance.  He said, “Wait! Wait! Wait! You can’t  throw him into the fiery furnace without a trial.”  The other angels laughed him off and said, “What do you mean a trial?  This man is evil incarnate.  There’s no question.”
The little angel insisted on a trial.  They brought forth the heavenly scale and they placed all his sins on one side, and the little angel said, “Do you remember that one Friday afternoon he rescued a wagon-load of Jews from the muck?”  They said, “Come on.  How can you balance a life of evil with this one deed?”  He said, “I insist that you put it on the scale.”  So they took this one good deed and put it on the scale and all the evil deeds on the other scale.  No contest.
  They took him by the arm and were ready to throw him in again and he said, Wait!  Wait!  Wait!  You have to remember all the deeds that the Jews did, the Shabbos that they kept and all the sins that they were saved from doing and you have to put that on the scales as well!”  OK .  Just to please this guy they put those on the scale as well.  Again, no contest. “Wait! Wait! Wait!”  You have to put the instruments of the Mitzvah that he did.  You have to put the wagon on the scale. They put the wagon on the scale and it still didn’t balance out.  They put the horses on the scale and the little angel realized that he had lost.  So they take the man and are about to throw him into the fiery furnace and the little angel has one last
thought — one last desperate thought.  And he says, “You have to put the mud on the scale.”
And it balanced out.
You never, ever know what makes the difference in this world or in your evaluation. You may think it’s dirt, it’s muck, it’s mud; it’s a source of contamination.  Yet that may very well be the instrument that saves us.  We can never know how far the impact of our actions go, for good or for bad.  If I do one evil thing, it impacts on another person that impacts on another person that impacts on the environment that impacts on the world that impacts on the universe.  When I do a good deed, when you do a good deed, it spreads, it blossoms. 
After my father died, it was great comfort to me and my family to sit and speak with friends and acquaintances of his who shared stories of my father’s goodness.  My father was a very quiet man who rarely spoke about himself and so each story was a precious newly discovered gem.
Not only were there stories told at the shivah house but now it is common for people too far to visit during shivah to be able to send notes via the obituary page on newspaper web sites.  One comment from a person who my mother did not even know was someone who had worked with my dad 40 years ago and only for seven months.  He was saddened by the news of my father’s passing and shared this story.
His first job after law school was working as my Dad’s assistant at Florsheim shoes where my Dad worked as Chief Financial Officer and General Counsel.  About a month into the job the High Holidays arrived and my dad asked him if he planned on coming to work on Rosh HaShanah.  This man was new in town and had nowhere to go for the holidays anyway so he told my dad that he did plan to go to work.  My father looked at him and said in what I can only imagine was my father’s gentle but firm and persuasive way, I don’t think that would look good.  And so this young Jewish employee working in an almost completely gentile office did not come in for work on Rosh HaShanah.  But he had nowhere to go so he just stayed at home.  And it ate away at him that he had no where to go on the High Holidays and he wrote that after that experience he made a point of going to shul every year afterwards and became more involved in Jewish life.
It was gratifying to know how my father had influenced this young man in a positive Jewish way but here is the amazing part.  My father was not exactly a Lubavitcher standing on a street corner asking, Did you put on tefillin this morning?  I mean my father never kept kosher, couldn’t read Hebrew, I don’t even think he fasted on Yom Kippur.   But my father was proud to be a Jew and had an innate understanding that some things are kosher and some not.  While his son expanded that understanding in the realm of ritual, my dad had his standards and he took it upon himself to impart his views of how a Jewish American needed to comport himself in a Gentile business office circa 1970.
This one act made a deep impact on the man and affected him for the rest of his life.  Who knows how many individuals were influenced by this man who might not have had that effect had he not been influenced by my father. 
This is very much the lesson of everyone’s favorite movie It’s a Wonderful Life.  Every act can make a difference, even if we are unaware of the impact.  That is why we should follow Maimonides advice regarding these days of Teshuvah, to see ourselves as exactly benoni, exactly balanced between our merits and demerits.  Each act on our part has the chance to put us on the positive side of the ledger.  And likewise each additional righteous individual and each additional righteous act can influence the outcome for the world.  Think of it as the electoral college version of saving the world.  Just one vote more out of the millions cast in Indiana gives all the electoral votes from Indiana to that candidate and if the election is close, those 11 electoral votes can carry the entire election.  The whole election may hinge on one vote.
I shared the story about my dad with Rabbi Yaakov Bechofer when he made a shivah call.  He told me a story that in Dallas there is a very large Orthodox shul.  Years before it had been small since the Orthodox community in Dallas was small.  One day a Texas Jew walks in and asked to speak to the rabbi.  The rabbi had never met the man.  The man told the rabbi he was not religious but wanted to donate a million dollars to the shul.  Incredulous, the rabbi asked what motivated this generosity.  I was in Israel and I was visiting the Kotel.  I saw this elderly Hasidic Jew davvening with such fervor and I made a promise to myself right then and there that I would give a gift to keep this kind of Jewish fervor alive when I arrived home.”  The community used this money and did a lot of outreach and the Orthodox community grew from that gift.  Rabbi Bechoffer finished his tale by asking, “So you can imagine when this simple Jew gets to heaven he will be greeted with great fanfare.  What did I do receive such a welcome?  “What did you do?” the angels will cry out, why you built the Jewish community of Dallas! And he will look at them and say, “What’s a Dallas?”
So this year let us begin with the realization that every Mitzvah, every good deed, every kind word can tip the balance of justice in our favor and in the world’s favor.  May we infuse every action and deed with meaning and care and may we merit to bring the Ultimate Redemption in our life time.  May this year be a Shanah Tovah, a year of goodness.