Shana Tovah!

First, I'd like to thank the Rabbi and ritual committee for inviting me to speak tonight. When told that I need not talk on the partia, but could talk on any subject, I felt both excitement and dread - excitement at the vastness of possibilities, dread at being untethered, a domesticated animal whose fence opened to mountains and canyons, paths and ditches.. The comfort of an assigned text was missing.

So let me plunge headlong into a topic that is new for me, probably familiar to many of you. Shortly after I got the call - and let me digress for a moment on the subject of getting the call. When I was growing up, I sometimes heard various clergy people discussing the time when they "got the call" to preach. I remember one who got the call while plowing, another when leaving a bar. Well, I got the call to preach from Shana on her cell phone, so here I am. Shortly after I got the call, I read, or heard, a reference to the 36 - the 36 individuals upon whom at all times the fate of the world rests. I asked Sue if she knew about this; "You mean the Lamed Vovniks," she said. She explained that lamed vov is 36. She suggested I call Rabbi Aryeh Grayewsky in Jerusalem. "Oi," Aryeh said, "You want me to tell you about them? Go to Google, put in Lamed Vovniks." So I did. And I'll try to share some of what I have learned, and in so doing I hope I will somehow point to what I have not learned. As with many mystical constructs, the more one learns, the less knowledgeable one feels. And that is as it ought to be, because feeling knowledgeable can well be a mark of ignorance.

So who are the Lamed Vovniks? For one thing, if you expect an answer from them, you will be disappointed. One belief is that if a Lamed Vovnik discovers that he is one, he will die and be replaced by another, who will of course not know that he is one.

So what do they do, these special people who keep our world going? They feel the suffering of others. They feel it so much that, according to one story, when a Lamed Vovnik dies, his soul is so cold from the suffering he has absorbed that God warms the soul in his fingers for years. I don't think we will see the Lamid Vovniks on cable news bemoaning the sufferings of victims of Tsunamis, or suicide bombers, or bombs from Israeli warplanes. Those temporal blows from nature or humankind are certainly sufferings that the Lamed Vovniks must absorb, but their job description doesn't seem to include rendering judgment. And their job would leave them little time to schedule a studio interview

So where might we find a Lamed Vovnik? One of them might be gathering eggs, sensing the pain of the hens who expressed those eggs. Another might be a home health nurse, cleaning the body of an incontinent patient, feeling the patient's suffering and embarrassment and forgetting for the moment her own difficulties.. Another might be a military commander, exquisitely feeling the fear and pain of his soldiers and of the enemy soldiers. One might be walking in a city, feeling the suffering of people he or she passes on the street -- the frightened, the anxious, the confused Another might be seated on a city sidewalk, homeless, holding one thirty-sixth of the burden of the world.

Who knows where they are, these people whose absorption of suffering are bringing us another day? These people are not necessarily the same people as the righteous Tzadikim, who are often well known and publicly revered. Even those people could serve time as Lamed Vovniks, with their egos parked for a period of time.

This brief study has taught me this: since I cannot know where they are, I certainly can't know where they are not. The next person I meet - the cashier in the grocery store, the handicapped greeter at Wal-Mart, even the politician asking for my vote - might be a Lamed Vovnik. And because their task is so great, perhaps, they are given time off, or even brief, time-limited assignments. Perhaps, analogous to the 15 minutes of fame that is touted as a possibility in the modern world, each person might have a few seconds now and then when he or she is a Lamed Vovnik, almost overwhelmed with the sufferings of other people throughout the world. If that is so, the next person with whom one of us speaks could well be one of the people who has saved the world for us today.

L'shana Tovah