What Was I Made For?

Rosh HaShana Sermon 5784

Sometime in late spring of 2018, I received a call from Elissa Gruenberg.  Some of you may know her; she is the wife of Rabbi Josh Gruenberg, who used to serve Beth El, around the corner from us.  They were moving, and so they were getting rid of a lot of stuff.  “I have the Barbie motherload, and I’m coming over,” she said.  It was not a question.  Ten minutes later, we were blessed with over 40 Barbie dolls of all varieties and conditions, including some Kens, an enormous pile of Barbie clothing, shoes, and accessories, Barbie cars, and of course, a Barbie Dream House complete with furniture.  Thank God for our large unfinished basement.  Until that point, we had 0 Barbies in the house, and there was a reason for that. 

I grew up with Barbies and loved them.  I had my assorted Barbies marry my one Ken doll countless times.  As I grew up, of course, I dispensed with dolls in favor of feminist literature.  I viewed Barbie critically. Sure, she was the first mature, adult doll girls could play with where we didn’t have to play the part of mommy to our baby doll, and she had beautiful, fashionable clothes that reflected her varied hobbies and ambitions.  But her body was frightfully, unrealistically skinny and her features too perfect.  I rejected the impossible standard of beauty Barbie represented, and resolved that none of my kids would own them.

Fast forward to summer 2023.  Not only did I see the Barbie movie in the theater, but I took my husband, my parents, our au pair Bea, and my three impressionable daughters to see it with me.  On my birthday.  As a proud Smith College alumna, I had been hearing about the Barbie movie through all my Seven Sisters women’s college channels.  People were raving about the director, Greta Gerwig, a graduate of Barnard, and what she was creating in the Barbie movie.  Fully aware of the love/hate relationship that many girls and women have for Barbie, she incorporates the movie around this conflict, creating a Barbie world vs a Real world.  I went into the theater knowing that I would be seeing an unapologetically feminist movie.

It’s Rosh haShana, the birthday of the creation of all worlds, so I don’t mind telling you that Gerwig completely flips the Genesis narrative on its head, creating a Barbie world that women run.  Whereas it states in the book of Genesis, “The Lord God said, “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him… He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that spot. And the Lord God fashioned the rib that He had taken from the man into a woman; and He brought her to the man,” here, in this beginning, Barbie, in her pink, perfectly happy Barbie world, is fully empowered, and Ken is the one born of Barbie’s flesh.  He is the definition of a sidekick, without an identity independent of her.  It is as if Mattel, the toy company that produces the doll and serves as a kind of villain in the film, had said two years after making Barbie, “It is not good for Barbie to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for her.”

If you haven’t yet seen the movie, by the way, this rabbi thinks it’s worth your while.  I don’t think there will be any true spoilers this morning, but if there are, I will atone for them on Yom Kippur.  

Truly, this movie is wild and wonderful retelling of the Creation story, with Barbie and Ken booted from their bubble gum Garden of Eden to grapple with the apparent brokenness of the Real World, which include patriarchy, objectification, and sullen Bratz doll type girls who think Barbie is the root of their problems.  In this world, women and girls have put their Barbie dolls away because in so many ways, the Barbie ideal is dated and problematic, tone deaf to the messiness of the actual embodied world.  

It is hilarious, and heartbreaking at times, to see Barbie and Ken grapple with the revelation that, in this Real World, men appear to run the show. As they learn about the patriarchy, the viewers are taken through all the different stages and waves of feminism.  But, none of this was new to me.  What I wasn’t expecting was for Barbie to have an existential crisis about being, of all things, human.

The professor Brendan Myers wrote that “At the beginning of the film, Barbie is an object. She’s so perfect, that she isn’t even interesting… And Ken is an object, too: in fact he wants to be an object, for as the narrator tells us he feels entirely unfulfilled unless Barbie is looking at him. And then, Barbie drops the existential question: “Any of you guys ever think about dying?”

That, for me, is when things got interesting.  Because, you see, as Barbie evolves, it becomes clear that the movie is not about the patriarchy or the war of the sexes, it is about the messiness and beauty of being human.

But why would Barbie, the living embodiment of perfection, want to be human?

Throughout the movie, this main Barbie is called Stereotypical Barbie, and somehow, over the course of the movie, she feels she no longer fits into a stereotype or a particular narrow idea. “I’m not really sure where I belong anymore,” Barbie says to Ruth Handler, the little Jewish woman who created the Barbie doll.   Ruth is the closest thing Barbie has to a mother. Indeed, she is her creator. Barbie asks Ruth, essentially, “Who am I? What is my purpose? What now?”  Barbie is seeking a purpose of her own; she has grown beyond someone else’s perception of her.

It is a poignant moment that we as humans might relate to when we experience growth or transition.  Perhaps we want something different for our lives than what our parents want for us.  Perhaps we thought we would be happy in this job or that relationship, but it isn’t what we thought it would be, or perhaps we have changed.  Being human is surprising, as we try to meet the future as it unfolds, only to find out we are different from who we used to be.  As we evolve, we might question our purpose.  What our next steps should be are anything but clear.  But herein lies the blessing.

Pirkei Avot, the rabbinic text Ethics of the Fathers, in chapter 4, mishnah 3 tells us, “Do not disparage anyone, and do not shun anything. For you have no person who does not have their hour, and you have no thing that does not have its place.” Let’s take this opportunity, at this head of the year, to invite in the uncertainty, the messiness, some would say the pregnancy of this moment.  Let us grant ourselves the gift of some space at this juncture in our lives to each consider: What was I made for?  What is my place now?

In the movie, Billie Eilish sings:
I used to float, now I just fall down
I used to know but I’m not sure now
What I was made for
What was I made for?

What is it that makes someone human? Is it that we have feelings, are mortal, have memory? That we have a sense of selfhood apart from others’ perceptions of us, that we have hopes/dreams?

As humans, we are made of feelings.  We often live in our mind and heart.  About experiencing humanity, Ruth says to Barbie: “Take my hand, close your eyes. Now, feel.”  Close your eyes, she says, because it isn’t in the seeing that we experience being human; it is in the feeling.  The joy, the pain of loss, even confusion.  

It strikes me that being human is to have an internal experience no one else can fully know.

Rabbi Joy Ladin, one of the first out transgender rabbis, shared with Krista Tippett, the producer of the NPR show On Being, in an interview some years ago, her experience of not growing up as female, reflecting that, “one of the terrible things that we do to girls and women in this culture is that we stare at them. It’s also terrible to not be seen. The artifact of femininity, of attractiveness, of what we judge when we judge girls and women beautiful, often, I think, don’t feel to girls and women like they’re being seen as who they are.”  

For Joy Ladin, gender was a lens through which she was able to forge an identity and be seen for who she truly was and that is why she finally transitioned in her mid-40s.  She shared, “In early transition, it feels like you have no skin at all. There’s nothing between you and the world. There is no sense of identity… You are who you are seen as being, which is pretty hard to live through. But at those moments, I thought, “Oh, my God, you’re seeing me; I’m not monstrous.” Through her transition, she was able to express her inner self in a visible, physical form.

As I age, I feel myself being released from that “artifact of femininity” and I allow myself to experience my own inner world, my feelings, as what is beautiful. Experiencing our humanity means going within and appreciating the beauty that no one can see but yourself, to be in touch with the spark of the divine within you, from which you were created. 

So, this Rosh haShana, close your eyes and ask yourself, “What is the beauty within you? What makes you feel truly alive?”

‘Cause I, I
I don’t know how to feel
But I wanna try
I don’t know how to feel
But someday, I might
Someday, I might

There is a loneliness in being human, especially as no one can truly know our inner experience.  So, another essential part of being human is in the striving to share who we are and to see others as they are.  

The Jewish theologian Martin Buber, called this sacred kind of relating the “I-Thou” connection.  He described the necessary, superficial transactional interactions we must have every day with people out in the world as “I-It” connections, but I-Thou meetings were for him the most important aspect of human experience.  “All real living is meeting” he would say.  When one meets another as Thou, the uniqueness and separateness of the other is acknowledged without obscuring the relatedness or common humanness that is shared.

It is such a relief when you feel that someone sees you in a way that isn’t some kind of projection, but as Rabbi Joy Ladin described, is actually more like a mirror, reflecting the beauty of yourself back to you. We are blessed to have the kind of connections where you feel your soul connects with another in a way that you feel understood, appreciated, and seen. 

And, a central human need is in being able to share that spiritual connection from one generation to the next.  Ruth says to Barbie: “We mothers stand still, so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.”  That might be the movie’s most profound and poignant line. 

In parenting, our lives are not our own. Our lives function to a degree in raising up our children, and to the extent that is true, we must stand still, we must contract to give the next generation room to become.

But even so, we have a frightening amount of power in shaping the next generation.  That is a sermon unto itself.  But as I get older, and have the blessing of being perhaps a less tortured soul than I was in my youth, I see that my life is much more about sharing wisdom and perspective I’ve gleaned over time and the connections I can forge across different generations.  Human life is finite, but the relationships we can build and the influence we can have is truly infinite. 

Rabbi Joy Ladin shared that as she emerged from her gender transition and felt a certain wholeness of self, only then was she really to serve God, where she voluntarily felt, “You know what [God]? You’ve given me so much. What can I do for you?”

This Rosh haShana, we might ask ourselves, “How can I be of service?  What particular wisdom do I have to offer?”

And, while we are so much the products of our families and our history, I’ve come to realize that a third key aspect of being human is in the power and potential of getting to write our own story.  

Barbie tells Ruth: “I want to do the imagining; I don’t want to be the idea.”  

Ideas are intoxicating. To live in a world of ideas takes us out of our bodies; takes us beyond and away from the present moment. We might think that if we can harness ourselves to ideas, we might escape our failures and our decrepitude – our aging bodies, cellulite, warts, disease, weakness and fatigue, not to mention the many emotions that feel at times completely out of our control.  

But we, you and I, we are ultimately not ideas.  We are bodies.  We are born, and we die.  “Ideas live forever, humans not so much,” Ruth warns Barbie. 

Takin’ a drive, I was an ideal
Looked so alive, turns out I’m not real
Just something you paid for
What was I made for?

We are not toys.  A toy is molded by someone else, it is a product of someone’s creative vision.  Once it is fashioned, it is finished.  Although we can change its clothes or imagine different roles for it, it does not age and it does not die.  A toy is an idea – eternal, unchanging, exactly opposite of what a human is. But it’s “worse” than that – a toy is an idealized version of a human that then actual humans, impressionable girls, measure ourselves against.  It can have a huge impact on society, as we have seen with the Barbie doll. How can you compete with an object that is made to be perfect?

We are inundated with images of perfection.  On television, with competitions that are all about being the best. On social media, which is full of posts portraying our lives as shining, happy, and perfect, showing none of the ugly.  In our professions and in school, our work product must be impeccable. The skill of being “merely human” is becoming a lost art. But mistakes are always possible because we are not perfect. 

And that is a blessing! Where there is perfection, there is no room for growth.  I believe we were created purposefully as perfectly imperfect, so that we could learn and evolve over a lifetime. We need only look to the creation story of the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve immediately make a mistake and reap the consequences. The whole of Genesis is a lesson in human imperfection and striving.

While we can’t undo our past, and we can’t control how the present may unfold, we do have the ability to shape how we might understand a particular experience, and that is through the story we tell about ourselves.  If you are interested in how our stories can be healing and redemptive, I invite you to attend Dr. Molly Collins’ discussion session on Yom Kippur afternoon.  

And I have to say, this might be what I love most about this holiday of Rosh haShana, and about Judaism as a whole: that we can choose how we move forward.  This is the art of becoming human.

And further, we are responsible.  It’s not just a choice; we are on the hook.  As it states in Torah, but is more clearly spelled out in later rabbinic writings, God created us as partners in the ongoing work of creation. The Jewish God is not a toy maker who simply wants to play with his toys, or a puppeteer who directs our every move; God needs us to be actively and freely engaged in the work of creation. 

This is the bittersweet, poignant irony of being human – though we age and ultimately pass away, while we are here we as humans get to be creators.  And as such, we have the ability to recreate ourselves thoughtfully, courageously, compassionately. There is such power and incalculable value in our finite lives. In the words of the poet Mary Oliver: What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

This Rosh haShana, we might take some time to reflect on this central question: What were you made for? What were you brought here to do?

‘Cause I, I
I don’t know how to feel
But I wanna try
I don’t know how to feel
But someday, I might
Someday, I might

I reflect on what I do as a rabbi, what it is we are trying to create together as Kol Emet.  I think about myself as a mother, raising my three kids in a world whose future is quite uncertain as the planet warms.  As they take their Barbie toys out and dust off the Dreamhouse brought up from the basement, how do I prepare them for this world that is emerging?  And, as a 40 something woman whose hair is turning to silver and as wrinkles gather around my lips and eyes, I wonder: am I doing what I was brought here to do?  Am I using this one precious body with wisdom and gratitude, to build relationships, to love fully, to bring joy and healing to this super messy world? 

As we begin 5784 I hope we can spend some time, as Barbie does, familiarizing ourselves anew with the equal pain and exquisiteness of becoming human. May this awareness soften us, and shape us into more forgiving and more compassionate, humane human beings.  May we consider what is truly important, and let it give us focus and courage. 

Shana Tova u’Metuka – May it be a good and sweet year.