Rabbi Brian Strauss

good job us again everybody this past summer i had the opportunity to be at a lake house with my entire extended family and in that sunday morning i was in charge taking out all the nieces and nephews mostly under the age of 12 out on the lake and i decided to be fun and stupid uncle brian i allowed my seven-year-old nephew i was on the jet ski to actually be in charge of driving the jet ski as we pulled his other cousins on the inner tube and everything was going fine until my seven-year-old nephew decided to go before he was supposed to go and the rope got caught up in the jet ski cool uncle brian was really dumb uncle brian and that mistake was a big bill thousands of dollars and so i quickly acted like a seven-year-old and said it wasn't my fault the seven-year-olds to blame and i was reminded that expression it's not my fault and blaming someone else is a common expression the children adults and even rabbis used from time to time i was reminded that the mistake i made by letting my seven-year-old be in charge to try to have give him a good time allowed me to have that awful tendency to blame others for our mistakes and that tendency isn't limited to children we all have that human inclination now and then we look at something that we've done and that we wish we hadn't done or that we knew we shouldn't have done and we pretend that we didn't choose to do it or something bad happens and as an unintended result of something we did and we pretend it has nothing to do with us it's always easier to blame someone else blame the circumstance blame someone who may have nothing to do with what happened it's hard at times to take responsibility for the mistakes that we make that's what happens in the second creation story that we found in our torah portion this morning adam and eve eated the tree of knowledge of good and evil and are banished from the garden of eden because of it and as i looked at the torah portion this year i reflected on how the issue of personal responsibility is a critical part of this story when adam is asked why he ate of the tree he says that the woman gave him the fruit and when god asks eve why she did why she ated the fruit she says the snake deceived her and that's why she ate it neither adam nor eve take responsibility for having eaten the fruit yes most people think adam and eve were expelled from the garden of eden because they ate from the tree of knowledge but i think they were expelled from the garden because they didn't take responsibility for their actions because there's power in taking responsibility for what we choose to do i would argue that our young today as great as they are and with all the positive developments we find amongst our young today unfortunately i find more and more that are young seem to be taking less responsibility for their actions than ever before why there are many reasons too many to explain in one sermon but today i want to focus in on one major cause we all know that as smartphone gaming and social media addiction continues to increase for our young there are numerous short and long term negative effects disruptions to their sleeping habits leading to fatigue even insomnia more isolation and less socialization opportunities which can lead to a loss of friends and decrease social skills and it can also lead to more of our young entering the adult world completely unprepared not knowing how to take complete and how to complete excuse me not knowing how to complete basic adult tasks interacting dealing with real people managers and supervisors college professors and landlords or even completing household chores mowing the lawn when's the last time you saw a teen mowing the lawn cleaning the kitchen even doing their own laundry i was shocked when my son my oldest son went to college i saw many of his parents many of the friends parents his roommates and other people that he knew the parents actually hired laundry services for their freshman children because they didn't know how to use a washing machine compared to previous generations teens today are less involved less likely to work and even less likely to drive maybe that's a good thing too many of our young are having a difficult time taking full responsibility for their lives to complete any tasks outside of the virtual world this past weekend i had an opportunity to go to parents weekend in austin and i was with at a parent's dinner that saturday night and i was with a doctor an investment banker and a tv producer and they all said the same thing too many young adults in their industries are having a hard time taking personal responsibility for their mistakes instead of putting in the long hours they'd like to blame other people instead of owning up when things go wrong they find ways to blame other people never taking a personal accounting where they themselves went wrong and we're seeing this trend too often popular canadian psychologist and writer jordan peterson has talked about the importance of accepting personal responsibility in the dangers of seeing yourself as a victim jonathan haye the american social psychologist has spoken about the politics of victimhood and how those politics of victimhood are threatening free speech on university campuses throughout the united states and harvard sociologist robert putman has written about how the loss of communal responsibility has led to a breakdown of families and communities it's also the story told by the prophets of our tanakh our hebrew bible we hear from elijah elisha amos hosea isaiah and jeremiah without that deeply internalized sense of collective responsibility for the common good society begins to fracture and fragment before online gaming and cell phone addiction our young spent more time learning in the real world with peers with teachers with grandparents with parents it used to be that parents and other adult mentors taught children then empowered them to take on more responsibilities as they got older now too often they're stuck online and learn mostly there it's an online unrealistic world where they never learn to be responsible to take care of themselves other people even their loved ones it should be no surprise the children actually today are growing up to be less caring and less compassionate than in previous generations university of michigan research suggests that today's college students are 40 percent less empathetic compared to their peers just 30 years ago meanwhile the level of narcissism is increased by 58 percent a popular educational psychologist reminds us it's very hard to be empathetic and feel for another human being if you can't read another person's emotions you don't learn emotional literacy facing a screen you don't learn emotional literacy with emojis it's simply hard to care for other people if you don't interact with them as much and then to feel responsible to help them when they're in need and the result my friends is that too many of our young feel less compelled to help others irl in real life i know that social media and smartphones aren't going anywhere if anything the smartphones that we use are going to get even more addicting even easier to use and so can we encourage the responsible use of online media to learn to create and to participate as writer david brooks wrote in 2017 he writes can we remind our young that the online world is a place for human contact but not for human intimacy it's a place for information but not for reflection it's a place for exploration that discourages cohesion and it's a place that grabs your attention and then scatters it but in the real world the real world is a task-oriented space where duties and commitments need to be kept and can we also do a better job ourselves demonstrating to our children what it means to take on young adult responsibilities around our beautiful children can we teach them the meaning of words like ought should duty obligation loyalty virtue honor and then live by those words do we do we keep our promises to our supervisors co-workers and to our neighbors do we hold on to our commitments to our friends loved ones and especially to our children when our younger away from their computers if they see us not living by our duties then why should they in many ways they're only going to learn the values of honor and obligation if we too are living by them they won't find them online yes they can learn them from their teachers they can learn them from coaches they can learn them from grandparents and other mentors but ultimately they need to learn from us their parents let me end with the following story i'll never forget years ago during my freshman year of college that summer between freshman year and sophomore year i went back to dallas to work and i was determined to find a great job to prepare me for the real world and after a few days it was very hard to find a job for two and a half months while i was going to be home in dallas so i got a job at payless shoe source you remember those stores i think they're still around you go in and you pick what shoes you want off the shelves and if they don't fit you just leave them on the ground well as the youngest guy in the totem pole i was the guy in charge of picking up those shoes and finding out where to put them out to figuring out where to put them back on the shelves and kids would come in families would come in people come in and scatter those shoes everywhere within three days i was dying and i hated shoes more than ever before and the smell it was awful i tried to stay away from shoe stores until this day but then i was really excited after three days one of the resumes i turned in was to a bank and they were willing to offer me an internship at the bank for that summer it was a much better job much better and more likely to lead to what i was interested in at the time of being an accountant so i went home that afternoon i was so excited to saw my parents dad mom i'm can get out of this shoe store i got this internship at the bank my parents started to laugh they said no brian you're not going to that bank you're staying at that shoe store i said are you kidding i said this is my dream internship this is what i want maybe i want to do one day they said brian you made that commitment to be at that shoe store this summer and you need to keep your commitments and so i did and that summer taught me firsthand the importance of keeping my commitments even when it was hard shabbat shalom everyone let us now we're

Channel: Congregation Beth Yeshurun

Views: 21

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Rabbi, CBY, Beth Yeshurun, Congregation Beth Yeshurun, Judaism, Conservative Judaism, Sermon, Shabbat, Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Brian Strauss

Id: sgbzwz6OSUI

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021