Drash for Rosh Hashanah Evening

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Jews

Step One:  From Dependence to Independence

(Part One)

Every year I spend some time and energy agonising over what to say from this pulpit during these all-important days.  Virtually every rabbi does, unless they’re pirating someone else’s drashot.  Or paying a service to provide them.  I’ll bet you didn’t know there were such services out there!  But there are.  I don’t subscribe to one.  This, in part because I’m not that lazy.  But also out of the conviction that, once people got to know me, they would know if I was speaking my own ideas or someone else’s.  So…I give my own, and I do sweat what I’m going to say sometimes.  It’s just an occupational hazard.

          Some of my colleagues like to speak about ‘big’ ideas on the High Holy Days.  You know, macro things.  Saving the world from our sloth.  Saving the Jewish people from themselves.  Saving the State of Israel from every existential threat it faces, internal and external.  The thinking is that these are big days, and that the attendance is big compared to the typical Shabbat.  It is therefore incumbent upon the rabbi to make a big statement.  But early in my rabbinate I learned that that’s not what is really needed on these days.

          Sometimes, it is impossible to avoid addressing a big issue.  As an example, on 13 September 1993, the entire world was abuzz about the signing of the Oslo Accords.  We watched the ceremony, at the White House, live.  Who can forget seeing Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat signing the accord and shaking hands in the Rose Garden?  We were taken by surprise.  The years to come would prove that the idea of peace between Israel and the Palestinians is yet elusive.  But on that day many of us were shocked into optimism.

          The White House ceremony was two days before Erev Rosh Hashanah.  Now of course, every rabbi in the world who wasn’t seriously behind the power curve, had already written and finalised his Rosh Hashanah drashot.  Myself included, and I was only a third-year rabbinical student.  And most rabbis put aside their carefully-crafted drashot that Rosh Hashanah evening and spoke about the event and its meaning to them.  But I instead delivered my planned drash.  My reasoning was twofold.  First, I don’t consider myself to be particularly qualified as an analyst of the news.  Sure, I have my opinions about world events just like everybody else.  But I’m as much an amateur in that endeavour as you.  My second reason for not changing what I was going to say, was that I didn’t see the events in Washington and the Middle East as in any way negating, or lessening the importance of, anything I’d planned to say.

          I don’t mind telling you tonight that I was way wrong that night.  I disappointed quite a few people in my congregation by not addressing the Oslo Accords in some way.  After such a ‘big’ event, it was hard for them to think of anything else.  They’d hoped that I would find some way to weave the enormity of the event into my remarks that night.

          As one more example, in the year 2001 erev Rosh Hashanah fell on 17 September.  Yes, that’s right – six days after the horrendous attack on my country of September 11^th.  I didn’t know what I could offer my congregation that night, given the new reality.  But I didn’t try to give a drash prepared weeks before.  Instead I stood in front of my Jews and we had a conversation about how we were feeling, as Jews and as Americans, about the recent attacks.

          So the fact that I’m reading from a script prepared some weeks ago, on a relatively prosaic topic, tells you that there haven’t been any earth-shattering events directly affecting us, in the last few days.  Or is it prosaic?  What I’m talking about is not earth-shattering, but it could be life-changing for you.   

          I want to share with you, over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur this year, some insights from a book that was life-changing for me.  I’ve mentioned this book from the pulpit before.  But I have not offered a series of drashot systematically drawing upon the principles that this book taught me.  Tonight, and in the days and evenings to come, I’m going to change that.

          The book is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey.

          Dr Covey first published Seven Habits in 1989.  Through the 1990’s it was all the rage at the corporate level.  Large organisations paid Covey’s organisation to train their leadership, sales staffs, and even their rank-and-file in the Seven Habits in order to increase the organisation’s effectiveness one person at a time.  Now it’s been around some time and might therefore be considered ‘stale.’  But it’s only stale if you’re seeking the newest trick, the newest secret to success, the newest advantage over others.  Seven Habits isn’t about those things at all.  What it’s about, is putting into effect your deepest-held values.

Recently over three months, I published a series of columns in Gates of Peace, the temple newsletter about Core Values.  I offered a model for three values, the ones that I use.  I challenged you to consider contemplating what would be your own Core Values.  To discern them and articulate them.  And then to let them guide you in your everyday life.

The Seven Habits is not about formulating Core Values.  It’s about making your values live through the way you live and operate.  It’s about ordering your life so that you can live according to your values.  It’s about living intentionally, and not being a slave to what others might require of you or influence you to do.

We all have habits that infect our behaviour day after day.  Habits are usually thought of as negatives.  Smoking is a habit that was commonplace when I was a child – I remember my parents smoking.  But today, given what we know about the deleterious effects of smoking to our health, it has become socially unacceptable to smoke in many settings.  Without thinking about it too deeply, we tend to classify smoking as an anti-social affectation.  Like nose-picking.  Or excessive flatulence.  In this context, habits are seen as behaviours that are at least partially compulsive.  Behaviours that we allow to rule us.

But Habits in the context of the title of Covey’s book, are a positive.  In this context, a Habit is the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.  It is our Habits, the behaviours that we cultivate, that we work to make part of our everyday behaviour, that enable us to be effective.  By taking on, and owning these Habits, we learn to master our own destinies.

Effective, in the context of the book’s title, means able to produce a desired or required result.  It doesn’t necessarily mean ‘successful.’  ‘Success’ is rather subjective as each person will define it differently.  But Effectiveness is quite objective.  If a person is Effective, you know it.  Effective is value-neutral.  People can be Effective for the good or for the not-so-good.  That’s why values clarification is a prerequisite to striving for Effectiveness.  If you are Effective in living out harmful values, you will cause harm.  If you are Effective in living out positive values, you will make a positive difference.

          So perhaps you can see how I, a rabbi, fell in love with this book.  Judaism is all about Values, Habits, and Effectiveness.  If positive, proven Values are not our guiding stars, then we are as a ship lost at sea.  If we do not have good Habits, we are as a rudderless ship.  If we aren’t Effective, it is as if we are not here.  It is a lifetime quest, for the Jew as well as for the gentile, to develop and maintain the focus of our Values.  To build Habits that enable us to live out those values.  And thus to be Effective, in a positive way.

          In Seven Habits, we’re learning to grow as individuals.  We all grow physically as we age, right?  In our first years we grow vertically.  Then, when we’re finished growing vertically, we grow horizontally.  We have a lifetime to grow horizontally!  But we also have a lifetime to grow spiritually.  And intellectually.  And emotionally.  But most of us have a habit of not nurturing all those kinds of growth in ourselves.  And that’s too bad.  Because the growth doesn’t happen just because of the passage of years.  It happens because, and only if, the desire for growth makes us reach into deep wells of wisdom and find growth in those areas.  And therein lay the tie-in between the Seven Habits and the High Holy Days.  The very theme of these all-important days is that, just as we measure another year’s time as having passed, each one of us measures the kind of person he or she has become.  No matter how young or old, each one of us is capable of growth and change.  The self-examination that might result in change for the better can be done any day of the year.  But the truth is that we often let it go.  And it’s no surprise why.

          Change and growth are difficult, after all.  It is much easier – in every way – to think of ourselves as beyond change.  To assert that we are what we are.  And those around us are just stuck with that.  That’s a much easier way to go about life.  Easier, but not better.  And not nearly as satisfying, ultimately, as endeavouring to grow and improve throughout the span of our years.

          When we’re born, we’re completely dependent upon others.  That’s expected of us.  That’s why we instinctively cling to our children.  We know that they’re dependent upon us.  But it is not desirable for them to stay dependent upon us!  Certainly we know this intellectually.  Emotionally we may fight against it.  Like Gus, the father of Tula in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  When Tula announced she wanted to attend the local community college and take some vocational courses, Gus reacted by plaintively wailing, Why you want to leeeeeeeeeave me?

          But emotions aside, we don’t really want our children to remain dependent upon us.  Certainly, if they reach their thirties and are still depending on our constant support, we are within reason to wonder why.  And to expect them to start to support themselves.

          So we agree that a big part of ‘growing up’ is becoming independent.  And certainly, managing the transition from dependence to independence is a large part of the challenge of adolescence and young adulthood.  But that’s not to say that everyone manages to achieve it as a young adult.  Each one of us is different.  As an example, I have two children.  One of them is growing independent too fast for my comfort, and the other two slowly.  But isn’t that always the way it is?  However, it isn’t about me.  It’s about them, navigating the shoals of growing into young adults.

          Many of us never quite achieve independence.  Each of you knows someone who took, or is taking, far too long.  Maybe you are that person.  For them, for you, Dr Covey offers the first three Habits.  Be Proactive.  Begin with the End in Mind.  Put First Things First.  If you can master these three habits, you will have made the transition from dependence to independence.  Or, to put it in Covey’s term, you will have achieved Private Victory.

          The first three habits are meant to keep us from spinning our wheels.  Everybody who has driven a car has probably experienced spinning their wheels, literally, at one time or another.  You tried to drive in conditions where your tires could not get a grip on the surface.  You were driving on an icy or snowy surface.  Or perhaps early in a rainstorm, when the pounding of the rain against the pavement loosens the film of oil on the surface and makes it slick.  Or perhaps you were in the outback, driving on mud or sand.  Whatever the conditions, your tires could not push or pull your car forward.  Your wheels spun faster and faster, but you weren’t going anywhere.

          This is an apt metaphor for what life is often like.  No matter how hard we work, we feel as if we’re not accomplishing anything.  We feel as if we’re not getting things done.  We don’t feel at all in control of our lives.

          I know what you’re thinking.  But Rabbi, sometimes you just get a bunch of requirements thrown at you all at once and can’t sort them out, can’t prioritise on your own.  You can’t keep your head above water.  Well, it is true that each one of us enjoys a different degree of independence of action in our daily and periodic tasks.  Certainly I, as a rabbi, enjoy more independence in that regard than someone who works, for example, as a cashier at Coles.  There’s no argument about that.  But even that cashier has some ability to arrange her work in order to get some control.  The premise of the Seven Habits is that we can be in control of our destinies.  Each one of us.  No matter what we do for a living.  We can achieve at least a degree of independence.

          Independence is a worthy goal, but it is not the ultimate goal.  It is a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of interdependence.  As important as independence is, as difficult as it is to achieve it, it is not the Holy Grail of life.

Once we have achieved some degree of independence – assuming that we have – then our task is to move on to interdependence.  To a state where we rely upon others, and they rely on us.  To a position we we’ve learned to trust others to deliver for us.  Where we’ve learned to discern whom to trust.  And others have learnt to trust us.    The second group of three habits have to do with the way that we interact with others.

The second group of habits is:  Think Win-win.  Seek first to understand, then seek to be understood.  Synergise.  These are the tools that will enable us to move from independence to interdependence.  When we achieve interdependence, in Covey’s phrase, we have gained Public Victory.

It is fashionable at times, to proclaim that we don’t care what others think of us.  To decry the very enterprise of worrying about whether others trust us.  To similarly not let our minds be cluttered with whom we might trust.  To be the Lone Wolf, self-reliant, not depending upon anybody.  Like the Marlboro Man, the rugged individualist riding the range and doing what he needs to do.  Some of us have a certain romantic attachment to this notion.  Perhaps, knowing how difficult it is to rely on others and have them rely upon us, we pine for a simpler way of life where we would be completely independent.

Well, forgive me if I’m bursting your bubble, but I have to debunk this myth.  First of all, self-reliant means self-reliant.  And in this technological age, none of us is.  Oh, there are certain conveniences that each one of us might choose to live without.  Mobile phones are absolutely ubiquitous, but everybody knows someone who refuses to obtain one or carry one as an expression of their objection to being electronically tethered.  Likewise, as useful as many of us find such gizmos such as iPads to be, many of us find we can function without one, thank you very much.  But when you think about it, we are all inextricably connected and unable to be truly independent in a functional sense.

Additionally, we are most definitely social animals.  It is unnatural for us to lead lives of isolation from one another.  We may have days when we don’t want to be bothered by other people.  And if we have the freedom to do so, it is perfectly natural to go ‘off the grid’ for a day or two.  To temporarily shut out the world so that we can be alone to contemplate.  But when someone lives an extended part of their lives in such isolation, we know that that is not at all healthy.  It is a sign of mental illness.  It is something that requires treatment, therapy, to teach the person of the importance and joys of human company.

This is why, if you remember a moment ago, I kept prefacing ‘independence’ with ‘a degree of.’  Complete independence is neither possible, nor desirable.  Effectiveness ultimately depends on your ability to go beyond independence to interdependence.  To achieve public victory.  To learn to live with, and to depend upon, others.  And to let them learn to depend upon us.

But next week, when we gather for Yom Kippur, I’m going to address the transition from independence to interdependence.  We’ll worry about it then.  Tomorrow, at our Rosh Hashanah morning service, I’m going to address the three habits that can lead us from dependence to independence.

          This evening, as we begin the Ten Days of Repentance, each one of us is challenged to look inward and see the person he has become.  Between now and Yom Kippur, each one of us is challenged to decide to visualise the person they would like to become in the next year.  And to visualise the steps that would be necessary to get there.  To facilitate your accomplishment of this bag task, I am offering you the model of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  My prayer is that you will find it helpful.  You may use this tool, or some other tool.  But use some tool, and get to this important work.  Gut yontef.