This morning, we read one of the most frightening stories in the entire Torah. In it, God orders Abraham to put his son, Isaac, to death. Such a command seems heartless and cruel. Yet an angel suddenly intervenes to spare Abraham the horror of completing this barbaric act.

Immediately thereafter, Abraham observes something special. He sees a ram and sacrifices the ram instead of his son. But where did the ram come from? It makes a surprise entrance. We find no mention of a ram earlier in the story. According to our rabbis, it was fashioned at the time of Creation to appear miraculously at the appointed moment.

What is important in this story is not that the ram appeared but that Abraham noticed the ram. In other words, he paid attention to something extraordinary in his surroundings. Others, preoccupied with this painful divine demand, might have overlooked the appearance of the ram. Abraham perceived what others most likely would have ignored.

Centuries later, Moses walked by an unusual little bush in the desert. There was something unnatural about the bush. A fire was burning inside of it; yet the fire did not consume or destroy the bush, as it should have done in this dry, arid, scorching desert. This was also a miracle. Moses turned aside to gaze at the bush.

God then commanded Moses to remove his shoes, as a sign of respect, because he was standing on holy ground. The ancient rabbis comment that others probably passed by the bush and failed to perceive that the Burning Bush defied natural law. Yet Moses stopped because he was alert and sensitive to this awesome sight.

The poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, understood this apathetic tendency of ours when she wrote these lines about the Burning Bush:

Earth's crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God
But only he, who sees, takes off his shoes
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.

We are so busy thinking about our jobs, our looks, our investments, and other mundane matters that we are oblivious to the blessings that surrounded us. We seem to be sedated into apathy. We are too absorbed with our petty thoughts to thrill at the budding of a rose, the flight of a robin or the scene of little puppies at play. We have lost our capacity for wonder. We greet each day with a blasé attitude. Our prayerbook reminds us that we often “walk sightless among miracles.”

But not only have we forfeited our ability to wonder and become amazed. We have also lost our aptitude to become shocked. Recently, I heard someone perceptively observe that to live a full and complete life, one must be able to act in two ways: to wonder and to shudder. We have lost our capacity to shudder, and I am as guilty as anyone else. Nothing horrific seems to bother us any more.

The late Rabbi Stephen Wise, one of the towering spiritual leaders of the last century, first visited China in the years before World War II. In that country, the only means of transportation at that time was by rickshaw. The problem was that the rickshaws were pulled by old, weak, frail men. They would cough constantly as they transported their customers.

At first, Rabbi Wise was horrified. He felt uncomfortable that his transportation should cause so much suffering by these rickshaw pullers. He was unable to sleep at night in the hotel, as he would hear their rasping coughs outside his window.

He told his hosts how agonized and troubled he was by the coughs of the rickshaw pullers. However, they reassured him: “Don't worry, Rabbi Wise. In two more weeks, you will get used to it. In a month, you won't even hear it.” And so it was. After a month he no longer heard the coughing. And that, he said afterwards, was the saddest day of his life.

Some of us may be burdened with remorse over the fact that we should have seen some disaster coming and did nothing to avert it. Nothing seems to trouble us. It might have been the symptoms of a serious illness of a friend or even the hint of a suicide.

The existentialist writer, Albert Camus, tells a story of a well-established, respected, and successful lawyer. His life had been nothing but a series of personal and professional triumphs. One night, in Paris, he was walking along the banks of the Seine River. Suddenly he heard a cry of a drowning woman. He decided to tune it out.

Years later, he suffered a financial collapse. Fiscally and emotionally, he was a wreck. Camus pictured himself sitting despondently in an Amsterdam bar. He was talking to himself and saying: “Please tell me, please tell me, what happened to you that night on the banks of the river and how you managed never to risk your life?...O young woman, throw yourself into the water again that I might have a second chance to save both of us.”

At the moment, we have been seduced by the Christian Right, but we are ignoring the danger signs. America is becoming a creeping theocracy, where Christianity could become the only official and accepted religion.

We have failed to become alarmed when the government allocates tax-supported dollars to Christian social service agencies that openly proselytize and won't hire non-Christian staff members, or when prominent political figures brazenly and blatantly call America a Christian nation.

We Jews can not allow this development to continue. We must constantly be on guard to urge our public officials to keep our country pluralistic. If we don't, we Jews may again become second-class citizens in our own land.

Of course, one of the reasons that we don't shudder is the same reason we don't wonder. Our national affliction is narcissism. Everything is me-me-me. We are too wrapped up with ourselves. We have bills to pay, we have a job to maintain, we have children to support. We have convinced ourselves that we have so many of our own problems and anxieties and can't take on someone else's burdens. We truly believe that other people's problems don't impact us. Wrong!

What happens even at a distant point may affect us locally. I learned this first-hand in 1967 during my senior year of rabbinical school at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Cincinnati is near Kentucky, but it is essentially a northern city.

During the early 1960's, most of my classmates and I were preoccupied with our studies and our student pulpits. We paid little attention to the bitter struggle for desegregation in Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham, Jackson, Meridian, and other southern cities. It is true that a handful of rabbinical students and far greater number of ordained rabbis did march with Martin Luther King. But the majority of us felt personally removed from those events, or so we thought. The problem didn't touch us.

However, during our senior year, just two miles from the campus of Hebrew Union College, a major race riot erupted on Reading Road, in Cincinnati=s African-American community. These Black citizens were frustrated by the neglect of their needs and their sense of disenfranchisement. They threw bombs and looted stores to make their point. Lynn was on the staff of the Cincinnati Speech and Hearing Center, located near the center of the rioting. She narrowly escaped serious injury one morning on her way to work.

We also learned this lesson emphatically on 9/11. Terrorists had been threatening the world's safety and security for well over thirty years. We heard about the Munich massacre, the Entebbe raids, and the countless number of hijackings and other massive assaults on airplanes and ships.

Yes, these horrors never quite hit us in the gut. It wasn't until September 11, 2001, when terrorists came to these shores to decimate the Twin Towers and the Pentagon that we finally began realize that terrorism in a distant land has become terrorism at home.

We know those whole generations of American Jews who lived during the time of the Holocaust wish that they had acted more decisively, since the signals coming out of Nazi Europe, even in the 1930's, had been so bold and ominous, but few paid heed to them. Elie Wiesel, when he taught at Boston University, used to assign his students to read issues of the New York Times during the years of the Holocaust. The barbarism of the death camps, where millions of Jews were being exterminated, was clearly reported. Yet few readers seemed to notice or pay any heed.

The famous German pastor, Martin Niemoller, personally understood that none of us is immune to the frightening effects of any injustice in our society. Pastor Niemoller was a Protestant clergyman in Hitler's Germany. He eventually spent seven years in two concentration camps, one of which was Dachau. His observation is searing:

In Germany, they first came for the Communists and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me- and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Those of us who are afraid to stand with others now should remember Martin Niemoller. When they come for us, we may have to stand alone, because no one else will be left.

Right at this very moment, genocide is raging in the Sudan, the largest country in Africa. Yet very few of us have paid any attention to this ghastly situation when reported in the news. The United Nations has called it the world's worst humanitarian disaster. Lighter-skinned Arabs on horseback, called the Janjaweed, whom the Sudanese government has sponsored, have wreaked havoc on Sudan's Black African people.

In their zeal for ethnic cleansing, the Janjaweed have bombed and scorched entire villages and towns. They have destroyed water sources and food stores. They have systematically targeted civilians for mass killings, rape, and slave raids. The Janjaweed butchers have already murdered, mutilated, maimed or raped 10's of 1000's of Blacks and displaced over 1,000,000 others.

Not only do we see this immense tragedy irrelevant to our personal lives. We also become overwhelmed by gigantic numbers like 10's of 1000's or 1,000,000. We ask ourselves how our small efforts can make any difference.

But let us never underestimate the tremendous power of one person to make changes. We don't have to be prominent personalities to do so. Note how very few votes determined the last presidential election. We can donate to the Sudan Relief Fund of the American Jewish World Service to aid the victims of these inhumane crimes. Do we want future generations to ask us some day: “What did you do to salvage thousands of exploited human lives in Africa?”

May we understand that pain and torture anywhere in our world may some day touch us personally. Bernard Baruch reminded us so aptly: “We didn't all come over on the same ship, but we're all in the same boat.”

I began this message by noting the miraculous appearance of the ram to Abraham. How significant it is that it is from the very horn of a ram that we sound the shofar, our spiritual alarm clock. The piercing shrill tones of the shofar should wake us up. They should rouse us from our apathy. They should awaken us from our self-centeredness.

Thus as we enter the New Year, let us begin to open our eyes and our hearts to apprehend not only the sights of beauty but also the stains of suffering that envelop us daily. Perhaps these are the signposts that God is sending us to goad us both to wonder and to shudder. Amen.

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