Congregation Jewish Community North - Spring, Texas - Cocoon (Sermon

In preparing my sermons for the High Holy Days, I always try to find one topic that is highly controversial. In the past, I have spoken on how we must first overcome our own prejudices in order to put an end to prejudice, what we can do to live with our own addictions and with the addicts we encounter in our lives, the critical issues that plague the Israel as a modern Jewish State, and so on. This year, I decided to approach the most controversial subject imaginable: how you can find your own soul, how you can stop torturing it, and how you can learn to love it.

In our everyday lives, we answer calls. Some of them come on the cell phones we carry, some come in our email and in our instant messages and twitters, some come from our families and some from our friends, some come from business associates, customers, and bosses. From the time we wake up in the morning almost to the time we go to sleep in the evening, we are bombarded by things that demand our attention. If there are not enough demands coming from your personal life, the news media in print and on the web and on the television will find ways of worrying and harassing you. Is your health care about to disappear because millions of Americans need coverage and can't get it? Who was truly at fault in the death of Michael Jackson? Is the world so full of lone assassins and angry sharpshooters that you should be afraid even to shop at the mall? By the way, did we forget to mention that the sleeping pill your doctor prescribed for you has a few side effects such as the awful potential to stop your liver from functioning and, in a number of patients, has been shown to cause sudden death? Advertising never stops calling you: on the sides of the road, on cars whizzing by, on the web, in magazines and newspapers, in your inbox and in your junk folder, at the movie theater, at the symphony hall, at the museum, in the mall, on your cable channels that you pay for to avoid the heavy advertising of the free channels, and on your SiriusXM that you pay for to avoid the heavy advertising of free AM and FM radio. There are sales that you must not miss because they have a deadline and there are special offers on things you cannot live without which you can have two of, if only you are among the first ten thousand to call -- so you had better call during this infomercial while we are still repeating the telephone number every three seconds.

From daybreak to sunset, and even all through the night if you stay up late, you are being called to pay attention to one truth after another; one demand after another is being made on you and on your time. Because of where you live and when you live, there is no way to shut down this incessant flow of deadlines and demands. You have barely enough time to decide whether or not to buy that exercise machine that folds up and slips under the bed after trimming down your waist and building up your abs before you have to decide whether or not to buy an airline ticket now for the Bar Mitzvah you have been invited to attend or to wait for a few weeks to see if the prices of airline tickets will go down, and what if they go up instead?

It seems that all of modern society is aimed at making you insecure so that you will be forced to make one move after another calculated to make you more secure which, in the end, results in new insecurities. Right now, I dare you to close your eyes and clear your mind of everything that is calling on you from the outside. Don't worry, if you fall asleep, you can read the rest of this sermon on the CJCN web site, and if you snore the person next to you will put a gentle elbow into your ribs. Seriously, can you sweep everything out of your mind -- every worry and every pain and every tension and every thought of where you must go next, when this service will end, and what you must do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow? Can you free yourself (for even a brief moment) from everything that is calling at you, nagging at you, and eating at you?

Go ahead, close your eyes and clear your mind. I will wait. I will even stop preaching at you for a while to see if silence might help.

* * *

There was once a young fellow who saw a butterfly struggling to emerge from its chrysalis, the hard cocoon that protects it during its change from a larva to an adult. The fellow took pity on the struggling insect. He drew out his pocket knife and gently cut a little slit to make the cocoon a little easier for the emerging butterfly to escape. He watched as the butterfly easily freed itself and spread its wings for the first time, revealing bright and luminescent colors. But the butterfly did not fly away. Nor could he induce it to fly. It just perched beside the broken cocoon. In fact, that butterfly never learned to fly. It was doomed by the help it got from the young man. Nature intends the effort involved in breaking out of the cocoon as the way for the butterfly to strengthen itself and develop strength in its wings. The young fellow made life too easy for the butterfly and, without the need to struggle, the butterfly never mastered the strength it needed for its own life.

I do not know whether you were able to clear your mind during our moment of silence. I do know how difficult it is to clear your mind of everything. It is as much a struggle as the struggle to remember everything that you need to do and every place that you need to be and everything that you need to own and every call that you need to recall. But, even if you were able to clear your mind, that is only the first step in finding your soul. In a lot of ways, it is as if you have spent a long time spinning a cocoon on the inside of you, wrapping your soul with silken threads to protect it, and the cocoon inside of you has hardened over the years, so that silencing your inner mind only helps you to concentrate on the struggle that still lies before you: the struggle to free your inner self, your soul, from all the protective layers that you have wrapped around it.

Of course, you have not lost your soul. It is always with you. But how many of us have struggled to let our inner selves burst forth in all their luminescent colors and take wing? How many of us have struggled to know what we really want in life and how close or how far we are from getting it? How many of us are using our souls as a resource to help us thrive in life and how many are protecting our inner selves with hard cocoons and not allowing our inner selves to emerge?

The first step is clearing your mind. The second step is struggling to let your inner self tell you what you need to hear from your inner self. The third and final step is to learn to use your inner self, your soul, as a yichud, a way of coming closer to the unity, to the integrated self that your creator intended for you to have. It is this third step that changes your world because the world is what we see and hear and taste and smell and feel, and all these are things that filter through our inner selves -- none of these is "out there" and beyond our control. Everyone of these senses is "in here" and within our control. So we can have inner wings, if only we struggle to have them. But do not expect me to take out my pocket knife and cut open your cocoon to make your struggle with yourself a little easier. Even if I could do that, it would be the worst thing that I could do for you.

People sometimes believe that protecting you from pain, keeping you from struggling, and shaping your world for you can make your life better. This is the great untruth. Two women who had not seen one another for a long time, happened to meet in a dress shop. The one said to her friend, "The last time I saw you, you were still looking for the perfect man. Did you ever find him?" The other answered, "I did." The first one said, "Well, that's wonderful. Are you happily married?" The other answered, "No. It did not work out. I found the perfect man, but he was looking for the perfect woman." Before we can face the world in a search for what we want "out there," we have to know what we really want "in here." We have to shape our inner world with the help of our inner self, otherwise we are constantly finding what we think is right and learning that what we found is not, after all, what we are after.

I cannot remove your inner struggle to open the cocoon you have spun around your soul. But I can tell you what you will gain by breaking through, by taking the time to give birth to an inner soul that can make your life more beautiful and meaningful.

There was once a king who tried to shield his son from every kind of suffering and struggle. He told the prince that there were no such things as princesses or islands or God. Since the king removed every trace of these things from his kingdom, the prince grew up believing that his father was right. But there was something inside the prince that made him want to explore other kingdoms. So he ran away one day to another realm. And he was amazed to find princesses and islands. He even found a man who claimed to be God.

When he came home, he brought the news to his father. He had seen islands, princesses, and even God. But the king told the prince that all he had seen was only in his imagination. When the prince argued that he knew he had seen these things, the king asked, "The man who claimed to be God -- was he dressed in a tuxedo?"

"Yes," the prince answered.

And the king asked, "And were his sleeves rolled up?"

The prince nodded.

"As I thought," the king said, "You have been deceived by a magician."

The prince shook his head, but the next day, he returned to the other land and confronted the man who claimed to be God. "My father says that you are just a magician and that you used your magic to inflame my imagination."

The man said, "No. You are being deceived by your father. Your father is a magician. In his kingdom there are many islands, many princesses, and even God can be found there. The only reason you cannot see these things is because you are under your father's spell."

It was a very confused prince who came home to ask his father, "Is it true that you are really a magician and not a king?"

The father said, "Yes, it is true. I am only a magician."

The prince struggled hard to work this out. "Father," he said, "if you are a magician and the other man is also a magician, is there anything in the world except magic?"

"Now you know the truth," the king said, "There is no truth; there is only magic. What is outside of you constantly changes depending on what is inside of you. Can you accept that?"

The prince shuddered at the thought, but then he remembered how beautiful were the islands and the princesses and even the feeling of finding God. At last, he said, "Yes, I think I can accept the truth."

"That is well and good," the father said, "Now you can begin to be a magician."

Right this very minute, inside each and every one of you there is a magician struggling to be born. You must help your inner self to break through the cocoon in which it has been sleeping. You must give it the space it needs inside of you to emerge and bring you its gift. Let no one tell you what is missing in your world -- as long as you have your soul, you have all the resources you need to transform your world in the one place where transformation really counts. The world is not built on what you see and what others see outside of you. The world is magically built on what you see, hear, feel, and believe in your heart. Now, you can begin to be a magician. And let us say: Amen.