Sermons

Katy Kessler 9/28/20 Katy Kessler 9/28/20

Yom Kippur: Morning Service

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2020/5781

In the words of poet Langston Hughes:

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

This poem entitled “Mother to Son” has been on my mind a lot lately. I could not tell you exactly when I learned it, but I believe it was in elementary school…so a long time ago. It is a poem that rises to the front of my consciousness every so often, usually when the future seems uncertain. There is no question in my mind why this poem has been floating around in my head over the last few months. This poem portrays a letter written by a black mother to her black son.

You see, the morning after George Floyd’s murder, my son Fred and I went out for our usual morning walk. It was early. The summer sun had just risen and the dew was still on the grass. There was a stillness, a quiet that was simultaneously both eerie and comforting. Fred did not seem to notice anything different about this particular morning as he ran down the sidewalks of downtown Minneapolis noticing all of the trucks and buses and construction vehicles. As we walked we passed a father and his son also enjoying the early morning air. The father and I looked at each other and smiled and then he said: “We have to get them outside before things get crazy again.” I nodded as we both continued our walks. But, as we walked away, the full realization of the difference between the trajectory of Fred’s life and that of this little black boy hit me like a ton of bricks, the tears rolling down my face. Our children, all of them, deserve a better world than the one that we have created for them. We cannot go back to the way it was, and I know I will never truly understand how bad it has been for my neighbors, my friends.

There is no doubt that COVID-19 has been a tragedy. In the last 7 months we have struggled to educate our children while working, we have missed time with friends and family that we desperately need.We have replaced gathering at Temple with zoom services for Shabbat, holidays, B’nai Mitzvah and Baby namings.In this time we have said goodbye to loved ones over FaceTime and buried them over Zoom. We have lost our jobs and we’ve navigated economic hardships we could not have possibly anticipated. Our loneliness has become suffocating.

At the end of May, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was murdered with a knee on his neck, and protestors took to the streets. Since the beginning of this pandemic, we lost some of our greatest advocates for truth and justice in Representative John Lewis and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Each day we wake up bracing for the next news headline telling us what else in the world has broken. From skies thick with smoke out west, to east coast hospitals overflowing with patients, every time we think that things cannot get any worse...they do.

Yet, with all of the tragedy, we have been given the potential gift of insight.The lush carpet has been pulled back and the striped boards lay bare. In a poem written by Australian teacher and author Tania Sheko that has gone viral we see all that the virus has revealed about this world.

It begins in a world where there is poverty and plenty.

Back before we understood why hindsight’s 2020

When we were able to get anything that we dreamed of with a click of a finger.This is when the work life balance broke and families stopped talking to each other. Before 2020 when our children, where continuously connected to the entire world through their cell phones and devices, yet they always felt alone.We drove our cars and flew our planes to find the stars we could no longer see through the smog filled sky.We filled our sea with plastic and strangled our sea life and starved our birds.

And while, the poem continues, we drank and smoked and gambled, our leaders taught us why

It’s best to not upset the lobbies, more convenient to die

Sheko portrays a compelling view of how off course our world has gone. Like the poem, Mother to Son, at first glance both can be seen as only about hardship and adversity. But, let us look closer at the poem. When read a few more times, we can see that it is actually about resilience and determination.

Don’t you sit down on the steps

’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

After a lifetime of hardship, this mother is still climbing. What is the source of her strength? What is the secret to her determination? How, in a world that is stacked against her, is she still going forward? There may be many answers, but I believe the answer is hope. Hope is what has sustained so many of us through the hardest and scariest moments in our lives. NOT unfettered optimism, NOT idealistic fantasy, but hope. As Eli Wiesel writes, Just as a person cannot live without a dream, one cannot live without hope. Hope has sustained the Jewish people. Hope allows us to acknowledge the challenges of today without losing faith in the end of the story. It is hope, along with resilience and determination that has allowed us to move forward.

We are all here today because, in many ways, our hope is born of our Jewish faith.It is not in our DNA to despair.On the contrary, in the mystical tradition, hope is a soul trait. Hope is a characteristic that we mindfully cultivate in order to become fully realized human beings. The mystical tradition, otherwise known as Kabbalah, teaches that we are all born with qualities of God imbedded within us. At any time, if we are not feeling this to be true, it is because we are unable to access them. Yet, through training and self-reflection we can bring these forward. Within us, right now, we all have the capacity for hope. We will still be confronted with despair, but we have the ability to convert it into hope.

In fact, we know we cannot “command” ourselves not to despair; it is inescapable at times. In such moments, we may instinctively lash out against even those we love, sometimes even against ourselves. This is when we learn to hold ourselves with compassion and use the energy generated by our despair to invite hope in: we utter a word of prayer for God to be with us; we call a trusted friend with whom we can share our anguished thoughts and feelings; we go out into nature; we read inspirational literature; we take an action, even a small one, against injustice. If our despair can lead us to action then it can also restore our hope.

With Judaism as our guide, we have the ability to continue to climb, even when the staircase looks impossibly steep. It is our Jewish values and teachings that will allow each one of us to lift our heads out of the self-isolation and the fear of change and begin to pay attention to the change that is already occurring.

Pay attention to the hospital workers living out the value of pikuach nefesh, saving a life, in their daily work with Covid-19 patients and all patients – especially those navigating terminal illness during this time of separation and isolation – speaking with and saying goodbye to loved ones over FaceTime.

Pay attention to those patients living every day with courage and conviction, living out the value of choosing life even when they know they will die soon.

Pay attention to the aerospace workers in Massachusetts who put tikkun olam, making the world a better place, ahead of profits and demanded that their factory be converted to ventilator production.

Pay attention to the Floridians holding the government accountable by standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office. Their actions reminded all of us of the Jewish value of lo ta’ashok sachir - to treat all workers fairly.

Pay attention to the residents of Milwaukee, who braved endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in a special election making sure that, as the talmud teaches, a ruler was not chosen without consulting the community. They did not allow the virus Al tifros min hatzibur – to separate them from their community.

And, closer to home, pay attention to the thousands upon thousands of people who marched for the value that EVERY person is created in the image of God.

The time is now for us to act on all that we have realized! For, while the temptation is to wonder when things will get back to normal? The challenge is to ask, how will we reinvent, transform, and adapt for the future?

The last 7 months have brought disruption to all of our lives. We have postponed, cancelled, changed, and reimagined so many milestone events. We know that there is no real “redo” for any of these things, and, if Judaism teaches us anything, it is that going back is not the goal. Our Torah portion this morning reads: Atem Nitzavim kolhem hayom - I say to you THIS DAY, I have set before you life and blessing, death and curse, choose life so that you and your descendants shall live.

This is our time to choose life by reimagining, reinventing, rethinking. This day Black lives do matter, this day women’s rights are human rights, this day we have to listen to our earth crying out from beneath its burden, this day our health care is not the same for all who are sick, this day our children are suffering from failing school systems. The video The Great Realization continues with a prophetic vision of what our world could look like.

Sometimes we must get sick, in order to get better. This day let us commit ourselves to the healing, the realization of the dreams, of the vision, of a better future to which this pandemic is pointing. Let us not give up on the hope that Langston Hughes described so eloquently.

Let us not turn back,

Let us not sit down on the steps,

‘cause we find its kind of hard,

Let us keep going,

Keep climbing up,

This day when we choose life.

Katy Kessler 9/27/20 Katy Kessler 9/27/20

Erev Yom Kippur/Kol Nidre: Traditional Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2020/5781

There once was a rabbi who escaped disaster and fear from a small town in Russia. He escaped to find a safe haven in a small Hungarian town right outside Debrecen called Hoidenanash. This rabbi, when it was safe for him to return home, he left the family in this small town a gift. It was an ark covering, and he said to the family, “This parochet, this beautiful ark covering — I want you to have it to thank you for all that you have done for me. I want you to use this parochet as a chuppah for your family. The generations to come will be married under this parochet, and your family will have many descendants.”

Fast forward.

The Holocaust came, and that parochet made it here to the United States safely. Frank and I were married under it 36 years ago. We stood under that parochet and felt the generations of our family—those who died in the Holocaust, and those surrounding us who lived. Out of the brokenness and disaster of that rabbi’s life in Russia, and of the Holocaust, was a new blessing — a blessing that began a long and beautiful journey.

My father-in-law, Dr. Stephen Hornstein, told that story at our wedding and we felt the power of both the brokenness and the blessing.

Rebecca Solnit tells us that in disaster the world is changed and our view of it. She tells us that what we deem important shifts, and what is weak actually falls apart under the new weight of that disaster. What is strong endures, and what is hidden emerges. Mother Nature knows this for a fact. On the floor of the forest are pods that are held shut by resin. Inside, these pods are new seedlings, and these pods only open up when there is a forest fire. Through the fire and the brokenness these pods create new life in the forest. And with the horrific and tragic forest fires that are out west, we only pray these pods will remain and survive and open up. With its devastation it cannot replace, but there can be a new a growth emerging out of what was hidden.

Judaism understands this power, and we all know it. The stories we have heard throughout our lives. Eve in the Garden of Eden — it is said that Eve actually ate from the Tree of Knowledge knowing that the idea of the garden and paradise would not teach us, and so we got thrown out so we could become partners with G-d in healing this broken world.

Jacob who became Israel — that story is so well-known. He struggled and wrestled and he asked for a blessing, and received it. And when it was all over, Jacob was limping, was still broken.

And then we have Moses and Miriam. They are at the sea. Here they are, between water and the pharaoh’s army. And before they can truly see the water break, they have to go in with small steps in order for the dry land to emerge. What was hidden emerged, and our people came out on the other side free from slavery.

Yom Kippur is a time where we are supposed to bring our brokenness. We are invited into this holy space, saint and sinner alike the liturgy tells us. No matter how far one has strayed from our tradition, no matter what you have done we are coming together — at-one-ment — together because Yom Kippur can heal us and make us one.

Now, it is funny that every year after Yom Kippur somebody calls me and says, “Rabbi, I didn’t run to do sin, but that’s what it said in the Vidui.” “Rabbi, I didn’t take a bribe or give a bribe. Why do I have to say it?”

And then there are the ones that we all know. Gossip. Irreverence. It is about this idea that all of us are together as one, and that we can be here for someone’s weakness to become another person’s strength.

In ancient times the priests use to burn incense on Yom Kippur. It was called ketoret. And the ketoret were a variety of different spices, but there was always one spice that was foul smelling. You ask why. Because the idea that all of the spices together, when they burn together, it is as though the community comes together. All of us have something to ask forgiveness for. All of us have our weaknesses and all of us have our strengths. And when we come together as a community on Yom Kippur, on this Kol Nidre, we are told the power of being together, the power of this day to heal us, to make things better, to move us to acts of righteousness and hope and courage.

Now we come as individuals, and that is a very interesting dilemma, isn’t it? We so often want to get rid of the things in our very personalities that we don’t like. Vulnerabilities and fears that we’d rather keep at bay. And what our tradition teaches us is actually that we have to bring all the different parts of us together, and that we have to give voice to even those things that we are afraid of or that we don’t like in ourselves. Sometimes we naturally want to take the best of all the other people that we know in our lives and put them in our being and get rid of the things we don’t like. Like we want to be as entrepreneurial as Steve Jobs, we want to be as beautiful as — you decide for yourself who that might be, or we want to be as smart as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It’s been said that she’s a super hero; I’ve heard it many times. She does actually have an action figure, which is pretty cool. And she did so much for women throughout time, but we also know that we all are human no matter how big our lives have been. You and I and everybody, we sometimes feel competent and confident, like we can do it all, and are really smart. And then there are other times we feel like a complete imposter. It is the reality. We feel the both/and. That is what’s so important.

Temperament and personality make the day. One of my favorite lines is, “You are perfect the way you are, and you need a lot of work.” You see, we can change greatly, but not fundamentally. We are brought into this world with so much and we need to bring out those vulnerable, scared aspects of ourselves that we will nurture and care about. Because when we nurture the inside reality, then it expresses itself as tolerance rather than judgement, of understanding rather than dismissal.

When we disavow those parts that we don’t like in ourselves, it is said that they boomerang right back at us. They don’t go away, we just need to give them a microphone so that we can hear and we can transform the parts that need tempering in our personalities, one psychoanalyst said it beautifully.

You see, the internal work we have to do on this Yom Kippur — it’s not a construction project. It’s actually a renovation project. We might need to put a chair in the corner of the room, or rearrange the room so that some parts of ourselves can have a voice. And others that maybe have had too much of a voice can find some quiet. That is about coming together, of being human, of knowing the brokenness if each of us can become one and whole.

So what do we do in this year that feels so broken? A year of pandemic, a year of fires and hurricanes, a year of discontent. How are we going to find the hidden that must emerge? How do we find and, like Jacob who became Israel, understand that wrestling with the brokenness is what we need to do?

Let me be clear: the brokenness is not the blessing. The blessing is in the ability of each of us to demand something different. To do the work internally and in our community. The blessing is Jacob. We might be limping afterwards, but we will be blessed.

There is a beautiful Midrash in Lamentations Rabbah (14:49). It is a midrash about a king. You can actually say most of the time a Midrash king equals G-d; queen equals G-d. The king built a chuppah for his son. His son was not very appreciative. Actually, the Midrash basically says the son was a brat. So the king destroys the chuppah, thinking that the son doesn’t deserve such a beautiful gift. But the son’s tutor, the son’s teacher, took one of the broken poles of the chuppah and made a flute. The tutor made music out of the brokenness. The tutor made music for G-d.

Thirty-six years ago Frank and I stood under that parochet that became a chuppah; we felt blessed. Even though the chuppah had been through so much — the brokenness of destruction and oppression and hatred — in a remarkable way, that chuppah had more blessings than I can even articulate. We stood under that chuppah and felt those blessings all around us. And it’s interesting, at every wedding we end our service, the ceremony, with the breaking of the glass, don’t we? Out of the brokenness comes the blessing. Out of the brokenness comes the celebration. Out of the brokenness comes the work that we must do — that everybody must do — to help a community be at one. To help each individual to be at one.

So what else to do today in this broken year, in this broken time, in the brokenness that we bring to the sanctuary via streaming, the brokenness of it all? Well, I’ll tell you. We’re going to break a glass, and then send you off to do the work Yom Kippur.

Mazel Tov.

Katy Kessler 9/19/20 Katy Kessler 9/19/20

Rosh HaShanah: Morning Service

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2020/5781

Fear

As we celebrate Rosh HaShanah we are afforded the opportunity to express gratitude for our blessings. Even unusual places where blessing might be found. Zoom, for instance, has blessed my life in many delightful ways. Who knew how well a jacket and a tie would go with pajama bottoms? And that mute button! What’s going to happen when we get back up on the bimah and you are sitting in the pews and we can’t mute you as we have been doing?

As the new year begins, we also weigh the consequences of our actions of the preceding year, and what we might have done differently. I was saying to myself only yesterday, “If I only I could go back to February and buy shares of Zoom stock when it was trading at $118 and has since quadrupled…” But I digress.

Over the past few months we have received many kind words about Temple’s ability to adapt to our unique and challenging circumstances. In fact, while some religious communities deliberated over whether it was kosher to use electronic media on Shabbat or Yontif, Reform congregations around the country pretty much jumped in doing virtual services, classrooms, counseling sessions, funerals, weddings, and b’nai mitzvah celebrations fluidly. My biggest challenge was keeping the Torah I had brought home away from the family dog who has never smelled that much animal skin in one place before. My dog Flora was begging me to let her do a devour Torah! Don’t worry, it didn’t happen.

Additionally, the word “zoom” has increased its status as a verb: “Shall we zoom?” “It’s been nice zooming with you.” “Hey, I was zooming with my friends.” “Should we text or should we zoom?”

Thinking about “zoom” as a verb reminded me of how the “reform” in Reform Judaism has also been long regarded as a verb. Not only did we reform Judaism 200 years ago, we have never stopped reforming! Our bold, audacious movement has always embraced change. And that reforming has often required great courage and intentionality during difficult times.

A notable example is the bold 1983 Patrilineal Descent ruling that recognizes the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother as a Jew. A decision that sent shock waves through the Jewish world. Imagine the chutzpah of the largest movement of Jews in the United States changing the very definition of who is a Jew! But in the long run we saved tens of thousands of souls who otherwise would have been turned away from living Jewish lives, and their children and grandchildren after them.

Such a decision had to transcend fear of the consequences. One had to have faith that, despite our profound trepidations, we were doing the right thing and move on that assumption.

An even more dynamic shift occurred now 48 years ago in the ordination of the first woman rabbi, Sally Priesand. Had other movements not followed suit they might not exist today. There are even branches of Orthodox Judaism that are now in the process of ordaining women, something that many believed would and could never occur. The progressive movement of Judaism has long been at the center of Women at the Wall in demanding the right to bring a sefer Torah to the women’s section of the Kotel.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was drafted at the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center in Washington. It is also a hallmark of our movement to have taken the lead on immigration and sanctuary congregations. After much discussion on the consequences of assuming that posture, we forged ahead, knowing it was the right thing to do. Were we concerned about the fallout? Absolutely we were. Did we let it stop us? Absolutely not!

If we allowed our fear of the consequences to rule the day we would be fossilized and frozen, time would march on without us. But Reform Jews face their fears and thus we remain dynamic.

If we have learned anything during the past several months, it is that we cannot go forward governed by fear. We all have seen someone in the grip of fear — the staring eyes, the shivering, the flailing at self-defense to try and articulate what is happening. The anger that fear generates between one person and another. The retreat into safe monolithic camps. This cannot be the kind of posture our God wants us to take in a real world with real crises.

Fear led many of us to make really moronic decisions over the past several months. I am reminded of the sign someone posted on an empty drugstore shelf which read: “To the people who have bought out the entire supply of hand sanitizer, may I remind you that you have left none for the rest of the population to protect themselves and thus not infect you?” Or the liquor store where all the six packs of beer were cleaned out, except Corona Beer. Or my west coast siblings reporting a deserted Chinatown in San Francisco because folks didn’t want to be exposed to the “Chinese flu.”

And yet for all of human history, fear has been a powerful motivator. According to social scientists, fear makes us hold more tightly onto what we have, and to regard the unfamiliar more warily. Put simply, fear makes us want to be protected, regardless of the reality of the threat.

At this critical moment in our world I believe it is important for us to sit up and take notice of any news, or policy, or demagoguery that seeks to alter human behavior by poisoning minds with fear. If somebody is preaching fear rather than hope or faith, you can be sure they are misguided, and are leading us down a rabbit hole that does not have our best interests at heart.

We know that living without fear is impossible. But our Jewish tradition teaches us that it is possible to fear wisely, to fear with courage, to change our fear reaction from immobility and retreat to constructive action.

There are two different Hebrew words for fear: Yirah and Pachad.

Pachad is the projected or imagined fear of something. Pachad is the over-reactive, irrational, lizard-brain fear: the fear of horrible rejection that will destroy us, or the fear that we will simply combust if we step out of our comfort zones.

The second Hebrew word for fear is yirah. Yirah is the fear that overcomes us when we suddenly find ourselves in possession of considerably more energy than we are used to, we suddenly inhabit a larger space than we are used to inhabiting. It is also the fear we allow ourselves when we are standing on sacred ground.

If you’ve ever felt a deep calling in your heart, or uncovered an authentic dream for your life, or felt a mysterious sense of inner inspiration around a project or idea, and it terrified you, you have experienced yirah. This is the fear that emboldens us to make constructive, albeit sometimes risky, decisions for ourselves and for the betterment of our world.

Yirah has a tinge of exhilaration and awe while pachad has a sense of threat and panic. Pachad freezes us in our steps, or causes us to react robotically, while yirah calls us to greater things.

These days there are many things being called to our attention to be feared — the fear of others who don’t think the same way as we do, the fear of a warming planet, the fear of the foreigner at our borders, the fear of totalitarian authority, and foreign espionage. And they are often brought to our attention to stun us into frozen submission.

A call to fear the immigrant is a classic appeal to pachad. The very reverse of the biblical injunction to welcome the stranger! Instead, we become frozen in our places and demand barriers to keep this perceived threat at bay. The Jewish people know firsthand the fatal consequences of turning away desperate refugees without a timely and fair hearing. Our ethical teachings require us to extend the same opportunities to those escaping violence.

This coming year of 5781 is going to demand courage in the face of adversity. Most of us will experience fear, but which kind of fear will it be? The destructive pachad or the empowering yirah?

In the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, no less than 40 times, God comforts us with the words al tirah, do not fear. It is a timeless message for our people that is as important in our time as ever. God is not saying to have no fears — that ain’t going to happen. Rather, God is telling us to push through our healthy fears and keep them in check.

The God I believe in is not bent on scaring the living hell out of us. The God of justice and mercy wants us to create a society in which all human beings are endowed with dignity and blessed with security. The fear that we call yirah may be frightening to us because we know it is challenging us to enact Divine change!

One of the most profound narratives in the Torah involves the scouting out of the new territory promised to the Israelite nation. The spies that returned give a report based entirely in pachad —an irrational fear of the unknown. And because of that reaction, what occurs? An additional 38 years of wandering are mandated. There is no moving forward when pachad is the guiding motivator.

And the terrifying story we just heard chanted, and that we listen to every Rosh HaShanah morning — the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mt. Moriah — is the chronicle of a man about to do something really stupid out of pachad —out of fear — to take the life of his beloved son. The pivotal moment comes when Abraham’s God says: Al tishlach yad’cha el hana’ar —do not lay your hand upon the lad —ki yadati ki yir’ah Elohim ata! —I know you are one who fears God. Or to put it another way: I know you are scared about what lies ahead of you; it is scary! But don’t let your fear make you a fool!

In essence, we are not a fear-based people and we don’t operate with blind allegiance!

There will likely be moments of fear this year for each of us. But I pray it will be not pachad —the fear that stops us cold in our tracks, but yirah —the sensation of outrageous audacious possibilities. The fear that leads to hope! Taking a chance of getting to know someone different from ourself; taking the risk to make ourselves bigger than we are today; allowing our dreams to take flight and not be held captive by the possibility of failure.

May we someday look back at 5781 and say that was the Jewish year we faced crises, but transformed fear into faith that we can and will affect Tikkun— we can and will repair a broken world.

L’shana tova.

Katy Kessler 9/18/20 Katy Kessler 9/18/20

Rosh HaShanah: Confirmation Service

Sermon by Rabbi Jason Klein
2020/5781

Charge to Confirmands

Shanah tovah, everyone.

Earlier this week, in a very quiet Temple Israel, I put on my face mask and traveled to the floor we affectionately call the Lower Level, and visited the consecration class photograph of 2009, 5770, which you likely saw at the beginning of this service. I struggled a bit. It was easy to pick out Darcy standing alongside you, Shiri, your kindergarten teacher, and our clergy, but it was harder for me to recognize most of your faces right away. Luckily I had Wendy and Abby’s help and I started to see more clearly—Gigi’s stance, Robert’s smile, Melinda’s face. And now, eleven years later, some have gone and some relative newcomers have arrived. I am grateful that you are all here.

You started this afternoon echoing a long-time Temple Israel custom in virtual space. Since you could not pass actual sifrei torah, Torah scrolls, to one another, peer to peer, symbolizing a more adult relationship with Jewish tradition and values as you make your way through adolescence, you shared lessons from this summer, a summer with a bit of a quality of the Passover seder: “Why was this summer different from all other summers?”

The Torah portion that we read next Shabbat is called Ha’azinu, It is the last before Simchat Torah, Moses’ final song of warning to the Israelites before they would cross the Jordan into the land of Israel and he would finish his 120 year life on earth. There is a curious scribal tradition for Ha’azinu. Ordinarily words in the Torah might look something like this:

This is the very beginning of the Torah, Bershit barah, in the beginning, God created, written in a style that appears to be prose. You might also be familiar with a different scribal tradition in the Torah, the tradition of scribing Shirat Hayam, the Song at the Sea, in a different way. The Israelites have escaped Egypt, have crossed over the Sea of Reeds, and are now singing out their joy.

It has been noted that the way the song is written may resemble two sides of the sea parting with our ancestors crossing in between. The text is both separate and yet connected.

This week’s Torah portion is different; it also appears in verse but in two mini-columns:

Why? Jhos Singer (in Torah Queeries) notes that it is as if at the Song at the Sea there was the beginning of separation—presumably from slavery in ancient Egypt, shown in the scribal tradition; in Ha’azinu, that separation is even more dramatic. There is a column of empty space between one column of text and the other. A whole generation of slaves has died in the 40 years in the wilderness; practically the entirety of the book of Deuteronomy, the last book of the Torah, is Moses’ warning to the people that the stakes will be higher now; the people will be more accountable in their own land, they will be more subject to outside influence as well. How separate are the columns? How wide is the space? Have the parents taught their youth the best lessons they were taught by their own parents growing up? Will the youth remember the lessons of their parents? Will there be a chasm between generations?

We celebrate Confirmation in the middle of your teenage years to acknowledge that, in the words of Sharon Shorofsky Mack, separation is a lifelong journey. There are likely some ways in which you all may feel a greater sense of independence in and even from your family of origin that you did at the time of your b’nai mitzvah, but you are still a ways off from being further from home in that way that the post–high school years may bring. Confirmation celebrates your ongoing choice—to be engaged in Jewish community, to act Jewishly, and to grow in our faith, our doubts, our hopes, and our dreams.

About a year ago, you all came together; some had known each other since kindergarten or even nursery school; others just met in Minda Hall on Temple’s Lower Level. And in lots of ways, by sharing highs and lows, talking about Jewish tradition from kabbalah to contemporary music, reflecting on your own growth, half of you traveling to our nation’s capital and lobbying for what you cared about, reintegrating with the rest of the group, and transitioning to this world of remote learning and connection, you have become, in your own way, a kehillah, a community within a larger community.

“Yesterday was history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift. That’s why they call it the present.” Today is a gift. You are all together in a way that was unpredictable a year ago—intellectually and emotionally so connected, even when physical togetherness is different. You have likely spent more time in person near your parents and your siblings than you might have imagined these past six months. Perhaps sometimes this is challenging. But it is real. It is the present. It is the moment. It is a gift. That’s why we call it the present.

Scene after scene in the controversial and thought-provoking Netflix series “13 Reasons Why” reveal adult after adult who somehow just don’t get it. We as the viewers maybe see something obvious about a child who is struggling, about a teenager who is distressed. And somehow these adults appear somewhat oblivious to some obvious cues and clues, leading to a variety of complicated, painful, and tragic consequences for these teenagers.

You are a group who gets it and continues getting it more and more, understanding each other, who appreciates—each of you in your own way—when people show up for you and when you have the opportunity to show up for other people. These six months and now the time ahead, I believe, has provided you opportunities to grow with your family and grow yourselves that you may not have had in other circumstances, and I hope you will feel like a great blessing in the long run. I believe you will. Sure, you have still had to learn a certain kind of independence, a kind of resilience, but you have also learned to connect and reconnect to others near and far in whole new ways, ways in which I believe will come to serve you well in the long term.

You continue to grow in a world that needs you. Sometimes there seems like a gap, like in that Torah reading next week across the generations—sometimes generations talk past one another, you know—all the stuff the “hey boomer” jokes are made of. But the reality is that the generations are intertwined, like the scribal image of the Song at the Sea, the Israelites crossing—one generation entangled with the next. The world as your parents’ generation has shaped for you and that you have found has been wonderful in so many ways—miraculous ways that are hard to count, but it is also profoundly broken. This year of being reawakened to the global climate crisis, and this has been a year—and I believe we are only at the beginning—of re-understanding the American story as one of deeply seated racism that has needed to be undone for hundreds and hundreds of years. We want you to be connected to us like the Song of the Sea, but I hope you will also find the breaks in the columns when you need them, because sometimes the world needs something brand new, and we are depending on you to get us there.

I know Abby, Wendy, all our clergy and your teachers join me in saying we look forward to continuing to learn and grow with you.

Shanah tovah and mazel tov!

Katy Kessler 9/17/20 Katy Kessler 9/17/20

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Traditional Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2020/5781

On average we breathe between 12 and 16 breaths every minute. By the time we are 50 years old, we have 400 million breaths. This is truly a remarkable reality; a sense of miracle. Physically, of course, breathing gives oxygen to every cell in our bodies. It is amazing to see the beauty of breath come into this world with an inhale, and we exit with a last exhale. The breaths of life: breathe in, breathe out.

In Judaism, breath is a part of what it means to be G-dlike, to have the divine essence in us. It is about remembering every morning we say elohai nishamov shenatata bi t’horah hi. Every morning we say, “G-d, you have implanted our soul within us. You have formed it. You have created it. And you have breathed it into me.”

In Genesis, G-d’s breath gives life. G-d’s breath hovers over the surface of the water. G-d gives breath to all the animals on the land, the birds in the sky, and all the creeping things on the ground. G-d gives breath. From that dust of the Earth, G-d breaths into the nostrils of the first human being the breath of life. It is amazing. It is miraculous. A daily miracle 20,000 times a day.

Covid-19 takes away the oxygen in our bodies like no other respiratory disease, and it doesn’t always show distress. In Norway, Dr. Marie Seim visited a man in his home. He was in his 60s and he had flu-like symptoms for over a week. Of course, with Covid-19 on her mind, she walked into his living room and could not believe what she saw. She saw this man sitting up, smiling – not looking upset or distressed at all. His breaths were fast and shallow, and he had a tint of blue around his lips and on his fingers. Dr. Seim really did not think that he was as sick as he really was until she measured his blood oxygen. Normally our blood oxygen is well above 90 percent. Her device read 66 percent. She thought she had it upside down and so she, again, measured the man’s oxygen; it was 66 percent. She called the ambulance.

Covid-19 has scientists and health workers perplexed. Really. They walk in and here are people who have such low oxygen levels that healthcare workers would expect them to actually be incoherent or in shock. But instead, these individuals are sitting in their chairs talking to their physician and calling people on their cell phones.

Silent hypoxia, it is called. It is the reality of truly giving one this consent, this view that they’re okay but really they’re in deep, deep distress. This is Covid-19. It is a respiratory disease that can quietly take your breath away.

It is amazing what we are living with in our times. Many of us have known people who have had Covid-19. And some of us might have even experienced what Dr. Seim experienced. But what’s amazing to me is this silent hypoxia, if I were a biblical writer, I would actually think that this is a reflection of our social reality. That actually, in so many ways, our social body is being deprived of oxygen. That we go about our day as poverty increases and homelessness is all around; where people are having difficulty finding food; one out of every five children doesn’t have food.

Racial inequity, police brutality, pandemics. It is really this possibility of finding the symbolism of this silent hypoxia, of where we go about our lives talking on the phone acting as though the problems of this world are too big or overwhelming for us to take on. Or worse yet, we are in denial and we deny that they even affect us, the problems of this world – the epically, biblically, possible problems in this world. That they don’t even affect us.

That seemed to change on May 25. Here in Minneapolis at 38th and Chicago, when George Floyd yelled out, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” as a Minneapolis police officer put his knee on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. “I can’t breathe.”

In July the bodycam coverage was released, and we found out a few new things. That the police officer as we knew had his hands in his pocket, but we heard from the first time his words. His words not paying attention or empathetic to the distress that George Floyd was in. “I can’t breathe.” The officer said it sure takes a lot of breath, a lot of oxygen, to talk.

George Floyd went into shock. He became incoherent. And his battle cry – I can’t breathe – was at the center of demonstrations throughout this world. It is the moment where that idea of breath was taken away. And for us, that cry is to be in the presence and to fight for racial justice and against police brutality.

When I was 20 years old I was at an urban studies program in Chicago. I all of a sudden was living and learning in the heart of the city. In this diverse world that I had never been in before, I took a class; it was Racism in America. The teacher, Pat Berg, she was the first person to confront me about my own racism and implicit bias. She made sure that all of the white students in that seminar had a reckoning with ourselves and became truth-tellers about our own history and our own sense of race, or the lack thereof. And so she was a contender. This strong and compassionate black woman became one of the most important educators in my life. She changed my world. She helped me see things differently.

My grandparents, like many of yours, were immigrants to this country from Russia. They came here to escape anti-Semitism, and to create a world and a life that was better for their children and their grandchildren. My parents, they were good and loving people. They worked hard. And my father, a doctor, he wanted to help people. But in that seminar, I had to come to terms with the reality of the phrases used in my house about the black community; perspective and opinions shared. I had to become a truth-teller about my own background. It isn’t just what my parents and grandparents said. It was the television programs I was watching in the ‘60s and ‘70s; it was the commercials that were on; it was the school that I went to, and the lack of diversity; the neighborhood I up in. On and on and on. I had to wrestle with the realities of the life that I was raised in and I had to tell the truth. It was so important.

In that seminar there were times I got defensive. I got fragile. I got upset. I didn’t understand. I felt misunderstood. But what was amazing is Pat Berg just kept on quietly, strongly, loudly telling me the realities of racism in this country. And I know with every breath I have that I have to wrestle with that every single day of my life. And I have tried from that moment on; I have been successful some and I have failed others. And I know that confronting racism is not comfortable. There is discomfort in that process, and I bring it on because it is the only way that I will grow. It is the only way that I can change. It is the only way that I can be a part of the solution, not the problem.

Immediately after George Floyd, it was amazing to see what happened here at Temple. My phone started ringing constantly. Congregants from white Ashkenazi backgrounds were saying Temple has to do something. People who had never spoken about race, who had never come to any program about race, all of a sudden were calling me and wanting us to do something; wanting to make it better, wanting to be a part of a world that stops systemic racism. They didn’t always know what to do. They didn’t always have the words to do it. But they wanted Temple to do something.

We started a white ally group, and that group is here to support our congregants of color group that started over a year ago. Jessi Kingston, who is a member of our Board of Directors, and I are partners in this work here at Temple Israel to confront racism, to make sure that we become anti-racist in fighting the fight against systemic racism. We reached out to all of our congregants of color to make sure that they knew we were thinking of them and wanted to know how they were doing. Of course as time went on and the violence in the streets happened, many people called and were unsure how to understand it. Others were upset about it, and actually began to disconnect from their initial desire to do something. Let me be clear: I condemn violence. I condemn what happened on those streets. That was broken glass. But I do understand that if we don’t get to the root of things, that that will never change.

Congregants at Temple were directly affected by that violence, businesses destroyed, and broken glass and chaos outside the living room windows of people who were afraid. We need to also understand, as frightening as it is, as absolutely unacceptable, we have to get to the roots of things. We have to look at this broken world.

Judaism believes that the world is broken. We were kicked out of the Garden of Eden because we were not ready to take on paradise, and the hopes and dreams of a perfect world. So we are not going to find that perfect world or the garden until we do the work in this world.

John Lewis, may his memory be for a blessing; he actually told us the importance of what it means to fight for freedom. He says, “Freedom is not a state, it’s an act.” It’s not some garden set in a plateau set in this beautiful place where you can eventually sit down and rest. That’s not freedom. John Lewis reminds us that good trouble is about the freedom of the work we all have to do in every generation. Freedom is doing that work. Freedom is about the hard work, not being fragile. Finding a place that it’s okay to feel uncomfortable because that’s how we grow.

In this work I have to be honest. We’re going to break a little, too. It’s just part of it. In apartheid South Africa there’s a story that I love about a white teacher who actually decides that his school of all-white students is going to play hockey with an all-black school. His name is Robert Mansfield and he did this until his Board of Education told him he could no longer do it. So Mansfield resigns in protest. Emanuel Nene is a leader of the black community is apartheid South Africa at the time, and he goes and seeks out Mansfield and he says to him, “I want to meet the man who doesn’t want to prevent children from playing with each other. I want to join you in your fight.” And Mansfield responds, “You’re going to get wounded.” And Nene responds, “I don’t care about the wounds, because when I get up there -- and I am going to get up into the heavens – the holy one will ask me, ‘Where are your wounds?’ And if I say I have none, then the holy one will respond, ‘Was there nothing worth fighting for?’ And I cannot answer that question.” That’s what’s being asked of us today. Is there something worth fighting for? Where are our wounds?

Rabbis Minda and Shapiro and countless laypeople have decided to stay in the city. Temple Israel is a beacon – a beacon of social justice, a beacon of Judaism, a beacon of religious voice – and we have stayed here because we understand that it is up to us. We have the possibility of helping, we have the brain-trust, we have our circles of influence, and we have the power to make change. Where are our wounds? What is worth fighting for? Because for me, if we sit out on this one then I just wonder, and I ask you, what will our history say about us? What will we say to the holy one when the holy one asks us where are your wounds? What will our precious city say if we sit this one out because it’s too complicated?

I love this complicated world. I am eager to do the work that we need to do. And so, our white ally group made a bold statement. They wanted to do something that was very essential and powerful. So the ally group went to the Board of Directors and asked, or proposed, let’s put it that way, that Temple Israel put a Black Lives Matter poster outside facing Hennepin Avenue so that we could give life and breathe life into the Isaiah quote over our doors: This house should be a house of prayer for all peoples.

This Rosh Hashanah we have our breath and out of our breath comes the sound of the shofar. The shofar awakens us. It is a place for us to make sure that you join Temple Israel in a robust program around race. We have been working on it for years now, and this year the initiatives are particularly important. We invited you to come with us to share in reading and share in opinion, but to make sure that we do that work.

In the month of Elul, just prior to today, we amplified the voices of those congregants of color. They are astonishing and exquisite. They are powerful. I invite you to go to our webpage and hear them. And I want to say that there was a nine-year-old, her name is Izzy. Izzy was born into this congregation as her mother was. Izzy is part of a multi-racial family. Izzy has a few things to tell us, and instead of paraphrasing it, I decided I think we should let Izzy speak for herself.

Izzy:

“When I was two years old I was having a fit over nothing like most two-year-olds, right? Of course I was with my dad who is a person of color along with my sister. A random woman saw me crying and snatched me away from my dad. I cried as hard as I could without choking on my own spit. I was reaching for my dad as long as my little two-year-old arms could reach. My dad reached out an managed to grab me back. The woman, still feeling what she did was right, walked away. In the nine years of my life I’ve seen more than that. For example, when I was four years old, and my dad had taken me to the park. It was a bright, sunny day and I was playing in the sand with him. Then a woman came over and started yelling, “He is not your dad. Why don’t you adopt a black kid, not a good white one.” She yelled and yelled and yelled until I started whimpering and told my dad, “Can we go dad? I’m scared.” He was about to tell me to pack up the sand toys, but we just left and walked back home. And the woman was still ranting. I understand I just took a glimpse into the world of which black children and black people live in all of their lives, but that has really given me my perspective on life. Why throw stones when you can hold hands? Why use violence when you can go to a peaceful protest? So many people used to choose to use violence and throw stones. We need to understand the privilege we have as white people. We need to speak up because we have the ability to do it. All of us need to come together in spite of our differences so we can make a difference. You can donate, or protest, or just tell a friend hang in there, it’s going to be all right. Because you can make a difference. And right now we need all the difference we can get.”

Yes, Izzy, I promise you as your rabbi that Temple Israel will fight for your family. We love you. We love your diversity and we love your perspective. Thank you for having the courage to share it with us.

Twenty-thousand breaths a day. Miraculous and wonderful. But we know it is not just the number of breaths we’re given that truly values our life. Our life is valued by the people we love, by the work we do to make this world a better place. The breaths that we have we must share with the world and breathe life into the new possibilities in the wake of this historic moment. It is the possibility of creativity, the possibility of innovation, the possibility that racial injustice can be our past but not our future. Let us work together, because as the proverb so beautifully says, “It is not the number of breaths that we take in our life, but it is truly the number of moments that take our breath away.”

Shabbat shalom and shanah tovah.

Katy Kessler 9/17/20 Katy Kessler 9/17/20

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Nefesh Service & Seder

Sermon by Rabbi Tobias Moss
2020/5781

Conception Changes Perception

This has been a year full of separation and challenge, illness and anxiety, turmoil and tumult, difficulty and death — the difficulty and death that a normal year brings, compounded by the difficulty and death that a COVID year brings.

Of course there have been wonderful moments this year: births and virtual baby namings, Zoom b’nai mitzvah, more meaningful than you might think, technological innovations… But more importantly, human-to-human cultivation — checking in on neighbors, friends, and fellow humans, advocating for causes we believe in, finding ways to celebrate a 110th birthday in our community.

Still, the cheshbon, the accounting balance of the year, has seemed mostly to be in the red, pretty negative.

I keep seeing people on social media wish for this year to be over. One Jewish comedian, Eli Reiter, tweeted yesterday: “I’m lucky to be Jewish because it means there are only three days left to this dumpster fire of a year, and there are four more months for the rest of you.”

Most of us want this year to end, but a new year, with the same world, the same challenges that doesn’t solve much on its own. A year ends, a year begins, but does the world change?

Many of us have been susceptible to an error in Jewish translation, myself included. There’s Rosh Hashanah liturgy that says hayom harat olam — most frequently translated as “today the world is born.” Sounds totally fresh and new, suggesting Rosh HaShanah is the world’s birthday…not quite.

A better translation of hayom harat olam would be today the world is conceived. Today is the gestation of the world. Today we are invited to conceive of what could be, not necessarily tomorrow, but perhaps at the end of these 10 days of repentance, or perhaps what will be three months from now, six months, nine months. What the world could be after struggles and striving.

We are invited to see the world not as an “as is”— born, already in existence, an event.

But rather the world as “in becoming” — what could be, a process.

Quite obviously I don’t know the following firsthand, as I’m neither a parent today, nor a mother ever, but mothers have told me how much perspective changes at the moment of pregnancy — priorities, food choices, the body itself of course, the way you view the state and future of the world, etc.

This is what Rosh HaShanah asks of us: What needs to change for this new world to be born?

It always seems funny that Yom Kippur’s themes of judgment come after Rosh HaShanah. You might think it should be opposite: get your moral/spiritual/relationship affairs in order before the new year. But in fact, we need the eye-widening effect of Rosh HaShanah, a new year, a world that is still just in conception. This eye-widening allows us to see the possibilities of the world unfolding, and that in this great universe and world — a world in which black holes collide, and potential signs of life show up in unexpected places — that we have a role to play. It’s a bit part, but we got cast. We can be a parent, friend, aunt, uncle, cousin of the world that will one day be born.

Noah Ben Shea wrote collections of Jacob the Baker stories. Any of you know of this wise baker? For those who are not familiar, Jacob the Baker was a baker in a small town, whose great wisdom made him village famous — oh, how I’d die to be village famous.

This is one of the stories about him that reflects on the wisdom of a full life lived. This year was so overwhelmingly filled, over-wrought and overrun, that the story seems fitting for just the course of this year. Jacob the Baker:

And so one day, like many other days, kids shuffled over to Jacob’s bakery after school, plopped themselves down on some sacks of flour — the very gluten-filled version of a beanbag — and finally a boy found some courage, and asked Jacob, “Why do you often say, ‘A child sees what I only understand?’”

“A child sees what I only understand.”

Jacob paused, and then answered, his voice with a long-ago quality.

“Imagine a boy, sitting on a hill, looking out through his innocence on the expanse, mystery, and beauty of the world. Slowly the child begins to learn. He does this by collecting small stones of knowledge, placing one on top of the other. Over time, his learning becomes a wall, a wall he has built in front of himself.

Now, when he looks out, he can see his learning, but he has lost his view. And so he is now a man, no longer a boy. And this man is both proud and sad. The man looks at his predicament, this wall of learning, and decides to take down the wall. But to take down a wall takes time, and when he finally accomplishes the task, he has become an elder, an old man.

The old man rests on the hill and looks out through his experience on the beauty of the world. He understands what has happened to him. He understands what he sees. But he does not see the world the way he saw it as a child on that first clear morning.”

A young girl interjects, “But, but, certainly the old man can remember what he once saw!”

Jacob responds, “You are right, experience matures to memory. But memory is the gentlest of truths.”

“Are you afraid of growing old, Jacob?” asks a child, giggling.

“What grows never grows old,” said Jacob.

This parable speaks to the full span of life. But I believe it has much wisdom, to speak to the span of a year, especially this past one. A year that began with our hopes and wishes for that coming year. With 10 days of t’shuvah, repentance, t’filah, prayer, and tzedakah, charitable giving, we tried to get ourselves on a good track for the coming year. And then over the course of this year, challenges came upon us, one after another, stone upon stone, boulder upon boulder, until suddenly it was hard to look over that wall. It became hard to see anything besides the challenges of COVID, the challenges of America in distress, the challenges of keeping the public safe—the whole public, no individuals or groups excluded. Inevitably, these challenges blocked our sigh. Will we only be able to see after each is solved, one by one, like in the story?

Quite the opposite. In order to overcome these challenges we need to see, to imagine, to conceive. The offering of Rosh HaShanah is to see anew now. The year changes from 5780-5781. “Should we be afraid of the world growing older?” the little boy might ask. “What grows never grows old,” said Jacob. And this world, it keeps growing, it keeps changing. It invites us to join that process to see over the wall, see with wide, fresh eyes. To see possibility in the world, to see possibility in ourselves. Today the world is conceived, and we can see anew.

Rosh HaShanah is the reset moment on the shechecheyanu prayer: shechecheyanu, vikiymau, v’higiyanu lazman hazeh. From Rosh HaShanah on, we are asked to notice the first time we eat a fruit in this new year, acknowledge the coming of each holiday in this new year, bless the first time we’ve traveled to Israel this year, God willing.

We thank the Source of Life for having given us life, for helping us to withstand whatever could’ve knocked us down, and for reaching this time, this precious moment.

Some of you may have eaten an apple earlier today. Tonight or tomorrow that apple is no different. So why shechecheyanu? You are different. Your perspective is different

TempleIsraelMN . 9/17/20 TempleIsraelMN . 9/17/20

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Traditional Service

Sermon by Rabbi Zimmerman
2020/5781

Izzy:

Shabbat shalom and shanah tovah.

Katy Kessler 10/9/19 Katy Kessler 10/9/19

Yom Kippur

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2019/5780

The Torah portion read this morning by our children is said to have been written by Moses, the greatest prophet of Israel.

The action takes place at Mt. Sinai where the covenant is made between God and the people Israel. This covenant is binding on everyone, not just the powerful elite, not only the head honchos of the tribes, but every woman, man, and child. An agreement for all the generations to come, right down to the present day.

Also mentioned in the portion is that there is nothing God is asking of us that is impossible to do or understand. It should all make perfect sense. With this guidance, there is nothing we cannot do in the work of perfecting this world.

The Torah portion is traditionally followed by the Haftarah, which is a section taken from the Prophetic books. When most people think of prophets, they think of predictors of the future. But in Israelite tradition, the prophet is one who awakens their community to the harsh realities of the present day and our overall behavior.

Essentially, the three roles of the Israelite prophet are:

When the people have misbehaved the Prophet says: You have messed up and you’re gonna suffer!
When the suffering begins the Prophet says: You see, I told you so!
And finally, a message very important to this holiday of Yom Kippur:God is ready and willing to still deal kindly with you if and when you mend your ways.

There have been many kinds of prophetic types in Israelite history. Some of them are famous old friends.

Abraham, who brought the message of a one-and-only God who was an ethical commanding presence to the world. The rabbis teach that when he had his “aha” moment as a young man, he had to smash a shop full of idols to break with the past. Abraham was ridiculed for talking to and even bargaining with an invisible God.

Then there was Moses, who claimed no monopoly on the craft. No, he believed every single one of us is equipped with the bandwidth for prophecy. Moses was assailed by rebellious Israelites for thinking he was a big shot. He wound up having a desert meltdown.

Jonah, whose book we read this very Yom Kippur afternoon, gets the Divine Tweet and responds by running as far away from God as possible, because he didn’t believe in giving people second chances!

Jeremiah, who foretold the destruction of Jerusalem by fire, and who was known as the weeping prophet, admonishes the people and gets thrown into a pit.

And let’s not forget Noah, who receives the heavenly call to action, builds a boat and sails away without as much as a word of advice for his fellow earthly inhabitants. In the hundred years it took him to build the ark, Noah was teased and maligned every step of the way for his doomsday approach.

Three thousand years later, a young girl from Sweden gets on a rather different kind of boat, travelling via sun-powered watercraft across the Atlantic, and tells the world that we are the flood, and we are the ark. “I want you to act as if your house is on fire,” she says, “because it is! You say you love your children above all else, yet you are stealing their future in front of their eyes.”

If those words sound familiar to you, it is because either you saw Greta Thunberg addressing the United Nations, or you heard her prophetic call as the recitation of the Haftarah just moments ago.

In almost every instant, the prophet is mocked, challenged, and their warnings are diminished as nonsense. But Greta has the added disadvantage of being a teenager and not taken seriously by the generation that has allowed our world to be in the precarious state it is in.

Indeed, none of the prophets of Israel were children. But each of them experienced deep personal pain over what had befallen their people. And perhaps this is why the modern prophet needs to be a child. Because maybe the rest of us just aren’t hurting enough about a calamity that won’t reach its full strength until after we have departed this world!

I have had control of a public microphone for 31 years as a professional clergyman, and have too rarely addressed what now appears to be the issue of our lives because I thought it might ruffle political feathers.

So I consider myself complicit. But if I am unable to hurt enough about it to be prophetic, then I am going to listen to the next generation tell me what needs to be done. We may not have been so great leading out in front, but our children should know that we have their backs! We should support them, or, at the very least, get out of their way!

This year, during the hottest July ever recorded in human history, Iceland memorialized its first ever loss of a glacier to climate change. At a funeral for the Okjökull glacier, the Icelandic Prime Minister and the former UN Human Rights Commissioner dedicated a plaque at the former site of the glacier which bore the inscription “A letter to the future.” And it read simply:“In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

I don’t want you to feel cheated out of your Haftarah today. By all means, read the Isaiah passage if you like. It is a beautiful piece of prophecy that calls us to see our fast as representative of hungry homeless people in our midst. It is as relevant today as it was 3,000 years ago when it was penned.

If it makes you feel any better, the Torah portion we read isn’t the original Yom Kippur passage either. Though we’ve become quite used to it, Reform Judaism exchanged an old parsha about an ancient atonement ritual sacrifice to a more effective Yom Tov message – that the solution to our problems is not somewhere out in heaven and unreachable by us!

This year we replaced Isaiah with a young modern prophet who is bringing the world a message it somehow doesn’t want to hear. And like the prophets, Greta has been called everything you could imagine.

Journalists and climate deniers and political figures all the way up to the top are maligning Greta and her prophecy, ridiculing her, calling her a petulant teenager, and diagnosing her mental capacity much in the way they badmouthed and critiqued the brave young Parkland survivors when they spoke out, finding every possible reason to reject the validity of their claims: that we have let the next generation down.

One critic labelled her a propaganda tool for leftist adults pushing their agenda. Others said, don’t listen to teenagers. They only repeat back what their elders have told them.

Really? Are you kidding? Have any of these people ever met a 16-year-old that does what grown-ups tell them to do?!

Nevertheless, millions of children worldwide took to the streets in response to Greta’s prophecy. They are sounding a shofar blast quite unlike any my generation has been able to muster. They are letting us know that their future is dependent on our present.

You know that Judaism believes in the power of our children. Perhaps our greatest display of confidence in their youthful character and ability to lead is that at the age of 13 we trot them out to read from the Torah and lead the congregation in worship, where they deliver a speech to us telling us what is important to them. They become part of our minyan – we not only count them, we count on them! Right here today we are counting on them to lead us in worship on this, the holiest day of the year!

So here we are in 5780, at the start of a new decade, and we are still involved in a covenant. The earliest biblical covenant was that of the rainbow and God’s promise never to destroy the earth. As one modern author puts it, a rainbow is a rope: it can be thrown to a drowning person, or it can be tied into a noose. No one who isn’t us is going to destroy Earth, and no one who isn’t us is going to save it. The most hopeless conditions can inspire the most hopeful actions. We are the flood, and we are the ark.

I think Moses was right when he said that each of us has the potential for receiving prophecy. We enact prophecy every time we name our children. We give them names like Gabriel, Gavriel – God is my strength, and Nathaniel – Natan-El – a gift of God, or Ezra – helper; Hannah – merciful.

We even give them the actual names of the Prophets, like Yonah and Noah and Yoel.

We bestow names that reveal our deep love of the physical world like Ilan – tree, Aviva Springtime; Devorah – honeybee; Yael – mountain goat. Greta – a Swedish form of Margaret (my granddaughter’s name), the Hebrew equivalent is Margalit – meaning Pearl… as in something choice… or precious… or as in: pearls of wisdom.

Every child’s name is an investment in the future. And now these children, with these prophetic names, are asking us to reconsider the world we are leaving them.

A beautiful Midrash we often employ at those naming ceremonies tells of God talking to the Israelite nation, asking, who will guarantee the future? The Israelites quickly respond that of course our great ancestors will guarantee the future! To which God says, “Oh that was so yesterday. Who will guarantee the future?” The people answer, saying the great Prophets of Israel will guarantee the future. God says that even the prophets of old are insufficient guarantors. Finally the Israelites get it right and say: “Our children will guarantee the future!”

“Now you’re talking,” says God. “The children are indeed fine guarantors. It is because of them that I give you the Torah.”

And it will be because of our children that we all will merit, God willing, an inhabitable world.

Katy Kessler 10/9/19 Katy Kessler 10/9/19

Yom Kippur

Sermon by Rabbi Tobias Moss
2019/5780

Our TIPTY choir just sang Etz Chayim Hee. “It is a Tree of Life to those who hold fast to it; all who support it are happy.”

When I was a kid growing up in Tenafly, New Jersey, just outside of New York City, I too was part of a youth choir. At Temple Emeth, it was called Etz Chayim. Ever since then, those words have had a special place in my heart. It is a metaphor that seems to do justice to the otherwise impossible to summarize: the scope, span, and sustaining spirit of Judaism and Torah.

A tree reaches upward to the heavens, produces fruit for nourishment, and absorbs sunlight into vibrant green and multi-colored leaves. For me, this upward growth symbolizes the aspirations that Judaism lays out to me and how I might always achieve new spiritual heights.

Of course, a tree also digs deep roots which establish its history and give it power to withstand storms and winds. I know that I can forever explore my roots, the span of collected Jewish tradition, to find meaning and sustenance. So I love this metaphor, Etz Chayim—The Torah is a Tree of Life.

But these words were wounded, this byword was bloodied, this metaphor was marred, on October 27, 2018, with the tragic events at the Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha synagogue, in Squirrel Hill of Pittsburgh. This was the murder of eleven Jews, killed in the very act of holding fast to it, to Torah, the Tree of Life. In the Jewish vocabulary, there is a single word that captures our immediate reaction to such a moment: Eicha?!

How?

How come?

How is it so?

How do we proceed?

How is God involved?

How is God absent?

How was a 97-year-old woman named Rose a threat to anyone?

We have a whole book in the bible called Eicha, known in English as the Book of Lamentations. The scroll is recited on Tisha b’Av, a day that is fully dedicated to the mournfulness of lamentation. Yom Kippur is a more expansive, more awesome day, containing the full range of human emotion—from sadness to joy, from mourning to dancing. In my remarks, I will dig a little deeper into the former, into sadness, but I hope by the end of this sermon, that we also bring into view the joy and hopefulness that are just as much a part of this redemptive day.

A lament is something we’re not used to. It’s a crying out without a solution suggested, without consolation conferred. Rather, eicha is a question without an answer; an exclamation that doesn’t provide direction.

Would you please read with me the lament now projected above, which I wrote in the days following the Pittsburgh shooting.

It’s now almost a year since we all in our own way said eicha. Some cried it, some whispered, some wondered, some cursed.

It’s now almost a year of Kaddish for those 11. We can’t adequately memorialize them, though I know their home communities will.

It’s now almost a year since their synagogue was devastated. Did you know that their building remains shuttered, surrounded by a fence, and the congregants are meeting in other locations for these High Holy Days? We can’t purify their building from here.

It’s now almost a year since Etz Chayim Hee, this beloved metaphor, has been so tainted. Perhaps it is in my power, in our power, to help purify just that, just those words.

The Talmud records that in the ancient Temple ritual, a scarlet thread would become white if the Yom Kippur ritual was successful. How, then, can we make our bloodied Tree of Life return to its vibrant green? The rest of the verse gives us an answer. It is a tree of life to whom? To those who hold fast to it. We need to hold fast to our Torah.

In my moment of lament, when I wrote that poem, I asked for a hero or sage who could, perhaps like the ancient Temple Priest, take care of this all for me, for us. But a year later, we know that an act of devastation can only be answered by 1,000 acts of chesed, 1,000 acts of kindness. Our community, in Pittsburgh, in New York, and I know here as well, received and gave 1,000 acts of kindness after the tragedy. In Pittsburgh, Jew and non-Jew alike and even opposing sports teams, rallied around the slogan Stronger Than Hate. That together, America’s loving portion is much stronger than its hateful one.

No hero or sage can prove this alone. Rather, as our Torah portion reads, atem nitzavim, culchem hayom, you who stand here today, all of you, regardless of age or occupation, all have it in your power to observe these teachings. The teaching is very close to you, says Moses, it is already in your mouth and in your heart.

So when the shootings at Pittsburgh occurred, or Poway, San Diego, or outside of the Jewish community at Christchurch, Charleston, or elsewhere, we usually don’t need new instructions, we just need to act upon our teachings. These wicked people are often publishing manifestos, but we are not a manifesto type of people, making simple proclamations. Judaism is about show, don’t tell—not manifestos, but manifesting our commitments, our kindness. We grab hold of our Tree of Life, our Torah, in which study leads to action.

If our grasp was flimsy, we’d have stopped coming to synagogue a long time ago, though I know thousands of you came for the service following the shooting, and you are gathered here again today, holding fast.

If our grasp was flimsy, we wouldn’t check in on a sick neighbor or a mourning friend, but I’ve already witnessed how deeply this community looks out for each other, holds fast to each other.

If our grasp was flimsy, we’d bristle at the inconveniences of increased security, but holding fast means supporting the financial burden and enduring the psychological burden of this reality. We give gratitude to those who are keeping us safe.

Holding fast means making the extra effort to meet Judaism’s demands for justice throughout our society. As we heard Isaiah articulate in our Haftarah, “unlock the shackles of injustice, loosen the ropes of the oppressed, share bread with the hungry.”

Isaiah also tells us that holding fast means honoring and remembering Shabbat and calling it a delight. That’s not always easy for us, even for us clergy. I’ll share a simple story, which reminded me of what happens when we hold fast to Torah.

A few weeks after beginning here, my girlfriend visited for the first time. On her first Friday afternoon, within the whirlwind of work, we managed the mighty feat of having a meal cooked and the table set for two before returning to Temple for Shabbat services. After services, we walked back to my nearby home.

Two blocks from home, crossing the street, I did a double-take, thinking that I’d recognized someone. However, in my excitement to get back to “my Shabbat meal,” I ignored that double-take sensation, and shied away from an encounter. But a voice called out, “Tobias?!” And sure enough, it was a camp counselor I’d worked with at a Jewish summer camp in Colorado. The counselor had been an acquaintance, but not more than that. We stopped to chat.

Like me, she’d just moved to Minneapolis. We marveled at the coincidence, but truthfully, honestly, my attention wasn’t with her. My attention was going towards my house two blocks away, to an intimate meal, an overdue catch-up, and time away from the new pressures of this public rabbinical role. But then that Torah-infused conscience of mine started piping up, like Pinocchio with a Jewish Jiminy Cricket inside. Or as Moses puts it, “the instruction is already upon our hearts and our lips.” So Mitzvot, commandments, and Jewish values flew across my brain: Jewish hospitality, welcoming someone new to town, inviting someone for Shabbat dinner, making Shabbat a delight. So I grabbed hold of that little piece of Torah, and invited her to join us for dinner. We re-set the table for three.

It was a small act, but most of life, thankfully, is responding to small moments, small opportunities. I didn’t solve a great ethical dilemma. I didn’t give some great sum of money to tzedakah. But now that Shabbat guest is no longer just an acquaintance, but one of my first friends in the Cities. She’s been back for another meal. She came here for Erev Rosh HaShanah services. Grabbing hold of just a little bit of Torah ultimately brought more joy to my world; I think to hers as well.

The rabbis say mitzvah gorreret mitzvah, a mitzvah leads to another mitzvah. Acts of lovingkindness self-propagate. Joy ripples through a society.

Now earlier I promised that Yom Kippur is known to tradition as a joyous day. The Talmudic rabbis say that there’s simply a joy inherent with repentance and finding forgiveness. An earlier sage provides a more specific illustration. Rabbi Shimon Ben Gamliel records the following tradition: There were no days of joy in Israel greater than Tu B’av (Jewish Valentine’s Day, in short) and Yom Kippur. On these days, anyone seeking a mate would dress in white gowns. All the gowns had to be borrowed, so that no one would know who was rich, who was poor, who was from royal or priestly descent, and who was a common Israelite. These white-wearing singles would go dance in the vineyards and meet their suitors. Who would think that the day of reckoning could have such romance? That the earliest JDate occurred on Judgement day?

Now, we do things a little bit different at Temple. Now it’s just us clergy that wear these white robes, and the white-clad Torah scrolls. I promise, we’re not about to dance for you; that holiday is in two weeks.

But on this day, joy still comes into focus. After the Kol Nidre awe of last night, after our introspection of this morning, after the healing and memorial services this afternoon, during Yom Kippur’s climactic conclusion, during Ne’ilah, we’ll bring up all the new babies of the congregation this year. They are our dancing joyful reminder on this Yom Kippur.

Rabbi Jeffrey Meyer, the Tree of Life synagogue rabbi who many of us saw on the news, asks what is the most important day of the Jewish year? His answer is the day after Yom Kippur. The day when we begin to choose, will our grasp on Torah be flimsy or held fast? That seems to me to be why Yom Kippur was once a day for finding your mate, and now is a day to celebrate babies and the next generation. We are celebrating tomorrow and all the coming opportunities, big and small, all the opportunities to hold fast to the Tree of Life. All its supporters bring happiness into the world. Shanah Tovah.

Katy Kessler 10/9/19 Katy Kessler 10/9/19

Yom Kippur

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2019/5780

It is never quite clear what brings us into the sanctuary on Yom Kippur. For some of us, it is our commitment to Jewish observance; for others it is our commitment to family; for still others it is about tradition. But, underlying all of this, there is a feeling in our kishkes about the true awesomeness of this day. It is the imagery of the gates closing and our fate being decided that pulls many of us in. Even those of us who do not believe in God, or are not so sure about this whole book of life and death thing, still decide to hedge our bets and show up. We walk into the synagogue, we are moved by the prayers chanted by the cantor, we are inspired by the power of this day.

Yom Kippur forces us to face our mortality, and allows us to enter the year renewed. The symbols of Yom Kippur, from fasting to wearing white, to staring into an empty ark during “Kol Nidre,” simulate our death in order to shock us into fully living our lives every day. It gives us time to engage in t’shuva, repentance, and cheshbon hanefesh, the cleansing of our souls. It allows us to evaluate our lives and enables us to confront the New Year with strength, resolve, and excited anticipation.

Rabbi Alan Lew writes a stunning description of Yom Kippur in his book This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation. He explains: “On Rosh HaShanah the Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and our name is written in one of them. But we don’t know which one. Then we come to Yom Kippur and for the next twenty-four hours we rehearse our own death. We wear a shroud and, like a dead person, we neither eat nor drink. We summon the desperate strength of life’s last moments . . . We utter a variation of the confessional that we will say on our deathbeds. Our fists beat against the wall of our hearts relentlessly, until we are brokenhearted and confess to our great crime. We are human beings, guilty of every crime imaginable . . . Then a chill grips us. The gate between heaven and earth suddenly begins to close . . . This is our last chance. Then the gate clangs shut and the great horn sounds one last time.”

The imagery described above shakes us to our core. It is meant to wake us up and ask us to take ourselves and our actions as seriously as they deserve. This is emphasized with the prayers of our machzor, those like the Unetaneh Tokef, whose words spell out all of the possible ways we could die. The prayer begins: “Let us proclaim the holiness of this day for it is awe-inspiring and fearsome” and continues by asking, “Who shall live and who shall die? Who by fire and who by water?” This could easily paralyze us. Yet, in our tradition’s brilliance, it does not allow us to remain in the fear. Instead, it lifts us up and out of it by giving us a way to counter God’s judgement. Embedded in the Unetaneh Tokef are directions for taking control of our future, the way that we can influence the judge’s verdict. Through repentance, prayer, and charity, we can avert God’s severe decree.

Every year, we come into this sanctuary to enact our own death and be restored to life with a new sense of hope and resolve. We come together for the courage to let go of our fears and our doubts. We come together to answer the call of Nitzavim, the Torah portion Cantor Kobilinsky just chanted so beautifully.

הַעִדֹתִי בָכֶם הַיּוֹם, אֶת-הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת-הָאָרֶץ--הַחַיִּים וְהַמָּוֶת נָתַתִּי לְפָנֶיךָ, הַבְּרָכָה וְהַקְּלָלָה.

“I call heaven and earth to witness this today: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse — therefore choose life!”

Hope. The imagery is severe, but it never leaves us without hope, which can be one of the hardest emotions to conjure. Renowned writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel teaches that just as a person cannot live without dreams, he or she cannot live without hope: “It is hope that gives us the strength to fulfill our dreams; it is hope that allows us to take the next step forward even when all seems lost.” For Wiesel, it was hope that allowed him to survive the camps. He explains, “After experiencing the concentration camps, [he] had been a part of a universe where God, betrayed by humanity, covered God’s face in order not to see. Humanity, jewel of creation, succeeded in building an inverted Tower of Babel, reaching not toward heaven but toward an anti-heaven, there to create a parallel society, a new ‘creation’ with its own princes and gods, laws and principles, jailers and prisoners.” Even having experienced all of this, Wiesel still understood the integral role that hope plays in not only the Jewish story, but also that of humanity.

Hope, survival, continuing on, is ingrained in our souls even if it is not always accessible.Hope is the reason children are born in displaced person camps or refugee camps; it is the reason that people get on boats that very well might sink or walk for miles and miles with only the clothes on their backs for the potential to enter a new land. It is what motivates each of us to work to try to make the world better for the next generation – even when it is an uphill battle. Yes, hope is a part of the very fabric of being human, yet it often feels that we have lost the ability, or maybe the courage, to hope.

Therefore, maybe we can find inspiration in the stories of those who find hope in the face of uncertainty. A dear friend and mentor recently recommended that I read an essay by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi entitled “Toward a History of Jewish Hope,” in which the author reframes our past of exile and expulsion from one of sorrow and pain into one of resilience, confidence, and possibility. Yerushalmi understands that since the Holocaust, the Jewish community has organized its collective lives around that era of destruction and death. He embarks on the journey of finding hope in our collective history in order to reorient future generations from fear of extinction to hope for prosperity. He argues that “Memory of the past is incomplete without its natural complement – hope for the future.” And, he continues, from ancient times through today, this hope can be seen in our people’s willingness to resettle.

The urge to change our place in order to change our luck dates back to the Torah. There is a Hebrew saying that means just this – meshane makom, meshane mazal. From the birth of the Israelite nation where God tells Abraham and Sarah “Lech lecha – leave your homeland and go to a land that I will show you,” to the Israeli covert operation Solomon that brought Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the early 1990s: as a people, we have an expansive history of leaving one land with the faith and hope that we will be able to live rich Jewish lives in the next.

So many of us have these stories of parents or grandparents or even ourselves, picking up and moving to a foreign country. For some of us the reason is obvious – either we live or we die. The future may be unsure, but the alternative is dire. For others, the reasoning is less concrete. We want a better life, we think the new place will have more opportunities for us, we need a change!We engage in our own personal Yom Kippur; we have a reckoning with ourselves, our families, we see what life will be like if we continue on the path we are on, and we choose hope in the future. This hope, in the face of adversity, coupled with courage and ultimately action, can be transformative.

Two years ago I was selected as a member of a religious leadership cohort called the Collegeville Multi-faith Fellows Program. This program brought together 11 religious leaders from the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim communities several times over a two-year period to meet with leaders from various facets of society including government, business, education, criminal justice, and health care. The purpose of this cohort was two-fold: (1) to gain insights into the unique opportunities and challenges Minnesota residents are expected to encounter in the decades ahead from a worker shortage to a growing senior population; and (2) to establish interreligious relationships with like-minded leaders so we can partner in creating solutions. Rabbi Barry Cytron and Dr. Marty Stortz of Augsburg University co-directed the program.

As this cohort met, debated, and unpacked the insights and predictions of our speakers, I was struck by Marty’s quiet optimism about the future. About halfway through the fellowship, I came to understand how deeply this optimism had been tested. I learned that only a few years into her marriage to Professor William Spohn, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer. Through his illness and untimely death, Marty learned much about hope and the role that it plays in sustaining people during their darkest moments. In her writings, she reframes what it means, and how we come by hope. As Marty and her husband William faced the cancer, the treatments, the side effects, and ultimately his death, they found that they never lost hope – they just changed what they hoped for.

Marty and William were deeply religious and spiritual people, yet it was not beyond them to become angry at God. To shake their fists and scream and yell. In truth, they may have done this in the privacy of their own home, during their nightly recaps, as they learned their physical time together was coming to an end. But they also felt God’s presence strongly. They felt God was paying attention to them through the love of their friends and family.

In one particular article, Marty admits that she could not always imagine what to hope for, but a deep and abiding hope held her and William. All they had to do was fall into it, like a trapeze artist falling into a net. The trapeze star had missed the catch, but she dared everything, because she knew the net was there. Neither of them had fallen off God’s radar screen, for they were both surrounded by the love of family and friends. So she was hopeful—devastated, no doubt, but also hopeful.

For Marty, this was the kind of hope that did not look forward to possible outcomes, but reached back to what was real. And what was real? For them, it was the sturdiness of the relationships with family and friends, the solidity of work, the daily graces that swarmed them. It was the family who came for a visit and knew not to stay too long, the friends who brought food to nourish them. It was colleagues who allowed them respite from the ups and downs of treatment. This is what sustained them during the never-ending tests and appointments. This is also what gave Marty the hope, and the courage, to leave California when a wonderful opportunity opened up for her here at Augsburg.

Hope is at the center of the story of Aaron Rapport and his wife Joyce. Aaron graduated from the Blake School in 1999 and went on to receive a graduate degree at Northwestern before completing his doctoral program at the University of Minnesota. It was here in Minnesota that he met his wife. They both became professors, first teaching in Atlanta and then in Cambridge. As the two built their careers and their lives together, they also fought cancer together.

Joyce was diagnosed in 2010 and Aaron in 2015. Neither allowed their diagnosis to stop them. Joyce became the assistant director of the newly-established University of Cambridge Office of Scholarly Communication, eventually working on special projects for the department in order to encourage researchers to share their data.Aaron was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge. He had already established a considerable international reputation, particularly following the publication of his book Waging War, Planning Peace in 2015.

It was their hope for the future that allowed them to move their lives to Cambridge, to build their careers, to continue to teach and work until the very end. Hope is what kept their marriage strong, even as they both went through their respective chemotherapies. For those who knew them, they will always be thought of as a perfectly-matched pair who never shied from sharing their philosophy of life with their students. During one conversation, Aaron’s student opined that “you only live once.” Aaron’s response? "You only die once; you live every day."Both Aaron and Joyce passed away this summer.

After sounding the alarm, the wake-up call that summons us on Yom Kippur, Rabbi Alan Lew looks further into our tradition and teaches us that at its core, Yom Kippur is a day of healing, a day of repair, a day that recognizes our fundamental brokenness and provides us with a remedy. Yom Kippur, in other words, is a day of hope, hope to carry us into and through the New Year. It is a day devoted to strengthening the hope we have and allowing us to renew hope that may be waning. It is a day when we pray not only to be sealed in the book of life, but also to have the courage for a life lived with hope. Ken Yahi Ratzon, May this be God’s will.

Katy Kessler 10/8/19 Katy Kessler 10/8/19

Erev Yom Kippur/Kol Nidre

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2019/5780

There’s a story about the Kotzker Rebbe. The Rebbe decides that he is going to spend Shabbat with a friend, and so he puts on regular street clothes for Shabbat. And because he is speaking at a nearby town, giving a very famous lecture, he has to board the plane as Shabbat is completed in order to arrive late at night. He doesn’t change his clothes into the clothes that a Rebbe wears.

He gets on the train and there are three students who are going to hear his lecture, but they don’t recognize the Rebbe. They begin to make fun of this old man who is feeble and moving too slowly. They laugh at him, they joke at his expense, and they even try to trip him as he walks slowly down the train car. They arrive at the town and they are excited to hear the Rebbe! And then, the reality hits them. Before the train has arrived, the Rebbe has changed his clothes and begins to exit to a big fanfare of the community waiting for him, and they realize that they have been making fun of the Rebbe himself. Shocked, they begin apologizing profusely. “Oh my goodness, Rebbe, we didn’t mean it. We feel so guilty! We are so sorry; we apologize.” The Rebbe lets this go on for some time until he finally turns to these three students and says, “You have apologized to the Rebbe, but now I want you to apologize to the old man on the train.”

Failed apologies seem to be all around us, don’t they? We have a lot of people who have done wrong in the world; hurt people. Really hurt people. And either have failed with an apology or haven’t apologized at all. Sackler family and the opioid epidemic, not taking responsibility . . . Madoff . . . We have Harvey Weinstein. We have Cosby. We have Louis C. K. . . . Over and over and over again, there are people in our midst who do not apologize, and I believe it puts our world out of balance and desperately in trouble. It is truly this idea that Aaron Lazare talks about, who was the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts medical school and has spent his entire career studying apologies. He wrote a book on apology. He says that you can apologize too soon, but actually, you can never apologize too late, meaning you should always apologize no matter how long ago the offense was. But too soon is a reality, Lazare says, because often when one apologizes too soon it’s to manipulate the situation. It’s to keep the anger of those offended at bay. And most of all, the offender has not done the work, the important internal reckoning, to understand what they have done. Without that point, really, your apology doesn’t stand. You can’t just quickly apologize for your behavior unless you really understand what has caused the offense. And that takes a lot of time. And guess what? That’s what Yom Kippur is all about.

Do you know that Kol Nidre is the longest service in the year? Why? Because we’re doing that apology stuff to God. Takes a long time.

I was listening to the radio and I couldn’t believe, as I was thinking about apology and all these averahs these sins that have been all around us, people who have offended and not had any apology – there was a whole conversation about how to bring offenders back into this community around the “Me Too” movement. Tarana Burke who coined “Me too,” understood in this interview that she is going to take care of the victims. We still need to hear the stories of the victims, we’re still hearing new stories of the victims. But she said that our community and our society has to also work on what it is to reconcile to where we can bring together these broken realities in our world. She says it really is not going to go away, sexual violence, until we understand why the wrong-doers did what they did. And in addition, for us, to acknowledge that giving them an entry back into society through the backdoor – through podcasts, through books – that isn’t going to help either. Forgiveness without an apology is cheap. We have to figure out how they are going to come back and do real t’shuvah, real atonement, do restitution because she believes that the people who are part of the problem are the exact people who have to be part of the solution. I loved that.

Burke understood that we as a community must reckon with the realities of reconstituting some understanding of how we treat one another.

Lazare goes on to talk about the fact that not only can one apologize too soon, but we also have to understand the history of apology. It was actually after WWII that apologizing became a part of civilized society: not as a reflection of weakness, but actually seen as a strength, which I think is a wonderful thing. He also went on to say what happens when you have to take responsibility for something you didn’t do? That’s something we struggle with, isn’t it? He explains that it’s sort of like buying a house. You buy the house and you own the things that you love. But you also own the hot water heater that bursts the day after you sign the papers – you own that part of the house, too. He says we have to take responsibility. We feel very proud of being part of this country, but we also feel the shame of this country being built on the back of slaves. We have to own both parts.

I’m very proud to be part of this community and this congregation and I feel honored to be the Senior Rabbi. And yet over this year you’ve received two letters about previous sexual misconduct from a youth leader in our community. And I feel ashamed of that. And I feel responsible for that. I have to take all of it.

Abraham Joshua Heschel said about WWII that there were few who were guilty, but all were responsible. Few were guilty, all were responsible. I think that is very much what it means to be a part of this community and understand that apology is part of this wider world. In This American Life there was an amazing story – there was an apology that the victim actually tweeted – that was a master apology. It healed a wound that was deep. Dan Harmon who is a head television writer, was attracted to a young writer who was part of his team. He put her work first above all the other writers; he created a jealousy in the group and an uncomfortable situation. She kept telling him, “don’t show me favors – don’t do this.” And then he told her he loved her. She said you’re my boss; no. And then he decided to make her pay for his humiliation. He publicly humiliated her over and over again. Six years passed and Dan made a public apology. He said exactly what he did, word for word. He took responsibility. He said, “I had these feelings and I knew they were dangerous so I did what I coward does and didn’t deal with them. I made everyone else deal with them.” He said, “I didn’t respect women. Because I wouldn’t treat somebody like that if I did and I would never treat a man like that.” She, Megan Ganz is her name, heard it on this podcast and was touched and amazed. She felt that there was a reconciliation that she didn’t think was possible. She felt freed and liberated and said she didn’t realize, hearing from him – ironically, the very person she never would have asked – to tell her what happened was true; she needed that affirmation. She needed him to recognize that he had actually hurt the very core of what she loved about herself, which was her creativity. She told everyone to listen, and then Dan said something that I think was important. He said you know, I think the world’s going to be better because we (meaning men) won’t get away with it anymore, and I think that’s a good thing.

The idea that you can actually ask for an apology or forgiveness or give it, that we put somebody else’s concern and belief and hurt above our own, that is when we heal. There is the head of the Orthodox youth movement, David Bashevkin, and he wrote a book called Sin-a-gogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought. He talks about a Hasidic group who understands that when we sin and ask for forgiveness and do the apology that we’re actually elevated to a higher status than just enjoying life in the perfect world. He said that the idea of coming to terms with our faults is the way we create a repaired world, of tikkun olam. He says that the people who show a complicated family history to their children and grandchildren, not only talking about the successes but also about the time you failed – the time you lost the job, the time you made the wrong decision – the time your family history isn’t so great along with when it is great actually creates a stronger next generation and a strong family. Personally, it’s the same. When you can talk to your family about the things you did wrong, about the losses and gains, the failures and successes, those are the ways we actually learn to be human. The Hasidic group says don’t be in duress. Don’t sit and try. Do the work of asking for forgiveness, of apologizing, because it makes the world stronger because of it.

We also are here to do the work. You can’t really do redemption or atonement without asking for forgiveness and an apology. I often hear people coming into sanctuaries every year saying, I don’t really like saying all those al chets – I haven’t done so many of them! I haven’t done this or that… and I think it’s so funny because I hope this year we lean into it. Instead of saying I don’t do this, let’s look at understanding it a bit differently.

One of my favorites from the previous machzor is confusing love with lust. If we keep that sin to the Harvey Weinstein, Cosby, or Louis c. k., then we’re really not doing the work we should. If lust fundamentally is power, which it is – having power over somebody else – and love is seeing eye to eye with another, sacrificing for another, listening to the hurt you caused even when it makes you feel uncomfortable – that’s love. I think sometimes we confuse the two. When we want to be right in an argument and win, that’s lust. That’s being powerful over love. I hear many people who have been married 50 years say that the best thing they ever learned in a marriage is that it’s better to be happy than right.

This Yom Kippur, let us identify with those three students on the train. Let’s find the time that we have to return to the scene and apologize because we haven’t treated somebody well or right. Let us return, just as I hope they would return. When we apologize and do the hard work of introspection, when we go to another person and show our remorse, when we build reconciliation, the world is healed. The world is that much stronger. If each one of us did that, think of what a beautiful community this would be. It would be one of strength, one where our souls would soar. Where our hearts would beat, where our hands would hold. That’s the community and world I want to create and I want to be a part of. G’mar tov.

Katy Kessler 9/30/19 Katy Kessler 9/30/19

Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2019/5780

Failure is not an option.

This famous phrase is associated with Gene Kranz, the renowned NASA flight director for the aborted Apollo 13 space mission. It also became the tagline for the eponymous Hollywood movie . . . and it is purely Hollywood. Krantz never actually said this phrase.

In my opinion, the line should have been failure is always an option. In fact, when we look back on the greatest inventions, failure – and more importantly, the courage to fail – is what led to success.

Which is why it is so confounding that we tend to focus on the “either/or” of success and failure, rather than the both/and. In fact, who we are, and how we respond to the events of our lives, makes a much greater impact than the events themselves. Our first example of this is in God’s actions. In Torah, God has many human attributes: God loses God’s temper and questions God’s own judgement. God changes God’s mind and decides to take a different direction based on experience. Even God is not so headstrong as to be unable to learn from mistakes. We see this very clearly in the story of Noah’s ark. We read in Genesis that God brought a flood to the earth because “God saw how much human evil there was on earth and felt that the only way to remedy this was to destroy humanity and begin again with Noah.” After the flood, there seems to be a change in God’s opinion. The Torah reads: “I will not again curse the land because of humans, since the human heart is immature.”

This idea of an immature human heart intrigues the rabbis. They determine that it refers to our yetzer harah – our inclination to act only in our own self-interest without thinking of the bigger picture (as opposed to our yetzer hatov – our good inclination – which comes later). In the story of the flood, it is the yetzer harah that made humanity act dreadfully and anger God to the point of destruction. It was only after seeing the effect of the flood on the world that God took a minute to unpack what caused humanity to act with such baseless instincts. God began to try to better understand people and reflect on that hasty judgment in order to treat people with more patience moving forward. God, our commentators write, determined that Noah’s contemporaries were ruled only by aggression, viciousness, greed, and moral indifference.Therefore, God decided to give humanity the Torah with lessons of humility and honesty.

As the sages unpacked this view of humanity, they began to realize this was only half of the story. We are not all bad! This is where the yetzer hatov – our good inclination – comes into play. The yetzer hatov enters us when we come of age, around the time of our bar or bat mitzvah. The sages continue by teaching that as we grow and mature from adolescence to adulthood, we develop our ability to balance these two sides of ourselves.

While an interesting idea and explanation, this simplifies the concept to a degree that makes these two drives polar opposite rather than on a spectrum. As Professor Jeffery Spitzer explains, our yetzer hara is not a demonic force that pushes us to do evil, but rather a drive towards pleasure or property or security. It is a worldview that is just about us. It is the material force inside of us.

On the other side, the yetzer hatov is a worldview that holds us responsible for the other people in our lives. It is what allows us to feel empathy for another person, to want to reach out and help.It is the spiritual force within us.

Both of these forces, if left unchecked, have negative consequences. With our yetzer hara we act only in our own self-interest.With our yetzer hatov we act only in the interest of other people.When the two come into balance we do things that benefit ourselves and the community – like get married and raise families, start businesses that employ others, work for safe and friendly neighborhoods. This allows us to live in harmony with our inner selves.

A popular comedy that just began its fourth and final season, The Good Place, picks up on this very Jewish idea that each of us has good and evil inside of us. Spoiler alert! The show begins with Michael, a demon, conducting a radical experiment on a new way to torture human beings. He picks four people with questionable ethics, who would never have gotten along in life, and puts them into close community. When they “arrive” in his neighborhood, he tells them they have come to “the good place” – heaven – and lets them loose. His theory is that humans are self-centered and mean enough that they will spend eternity torturing one another.

Then enters the protagonist, Eleanor, who wants to become a better person. When Eleanor enters The Good Place she is told it is because of all the humanitarian work she did in life. She is then introduced to her alleged soulmate Chidi, a professor of ethics. During the first season Eleanor admits to Chidi that there was a mistake and she was not a humanitarian in life. But, she wants to learn how to keep her yetzer hara in check. She wants to balance it with her yetzer hatov! Chidi agrees to teach her ethics. In return, and unknowingly, Eleanor helps Chidi to keep his yetzer hatov in balance: you see, in life, Chidi was so concerned with making the ethical decision that it paralyzed him making him unable to make any decision at all. Eleanor’s self-centered experiences are exactly what Chidi needs to live life – even if he is already dead!

Recently at Temple, we heard an extreme example of what happens when our yetzer hara (our “selfish” side) is out of balance. Oshea Israel and Mary Johnson-Roy told us their story of betrayal and forgiveness. On February 12, 1993, Mary’s 20-year-old son was shot and killed by then 16-year-old Oshea during a fight outside of a bar. Oshea was sentenced to 25 years in prison for second degree murder. Twelve years into Oshea’s sentence, Mary sent a request to visit him in prison. At first Oshea refused, but eventually he changed his mind. The two met and talked for over two hours. Oshea admitted to the murder and Mary forgave him, fully and completely. She could not believe she was able to do this, but she said that as she did, she felt like a weight physically lifted from her. For Oshea, Mary’s forgiveness brought both changes and challenges to his life. He said, "Sometimes I still don't know how to take it, because I haven't totally forgiven myself yet. It's something that I'm learning from Mary. I won't say that I have learned yet, because it's still a process that I'm going through."

For Oshea, part of forgiving himself is allowing himself to make big changes to his life, and surround himself with people who will help him do this. As he was speaking here at Temple, Oshea talked about adders, subtractors, multipliers, and dividers. Adders are people who add to our lives while subtractors take away from our experiences. Multipliers, on the other hand, lift us up to a higher plane then we could have imagined for ourselves while dividers pull us down into deep holes.Oshea talked not only about the need to surround ourselves with multipliers and adders, but that each one of us, at different times, are all of these things to ourselves and to others.

We all find ourselves in difficult situations, big and small. And we all make mistakes. But that should not, and cannot, keep us from asking: Who are we? What role are we playing in the success or failure of our own life or the lives of others? What can we do next to move forward? How can we help our compassion win over our fear? Our kindness over our greed? This is the lesson of t’shuvah, of repentance, of cheshbon hanefesh, of examining our souls.Our goal is not to be perfect, but it is to be open enough to learn from our actions when we are out of balance.Our goal is to never stop trying to be the adders and multipliers in the world. And those years when we are more to one side or the other then we would like to be? Those are the years we tend to beat ourselves up the most. But, in reality, those are the years when we have the most opportunity for growth.

Rosh HaShanah is known in Jewish texts by many names including Yom HaZikaron - "The Day of Remembering” and Yom Hadin - "The Day of Judgment." We understand the reason for Yom Hadin, but why, the rabbis wondered, is Rosh HaShanah referred to as a day of remembering? The answer comes from a midrashic description of God sitting upon a throne, while books containing the deeds of all humanity are opened for review, and each person passes in front of God for evaluation of their deeds. While I am not sure that my theology is such that I believe in a God who sits on a throne examining all of our actions over the past year, I do like the idea of spending time remembering – and assessing – our own past conduct and contemplating our path forward.

This image helped me recently as I thought about a comment a student made. She felt that she apologized for wrongdoings as they occurred and therefore did not need a dedicated day of repentance. As I thought about her comment, I realized that we give the wrong impression if we think that these days of awe replace apologizing in the moment. Rather, they give us time to look back and reflect on the past year. Unpack times in which our inner selves were unbalanced. Go back and finish conversations we only started.Maybe even apologize again, with more thought and meaning this time, to people we hurt.

As I think about my student’s statement, I cannot help but think about how defensive we all become when confronted with our wrongdoings. When asked what made Oshea finally agree to see Mary, he said, “For years I didn’t even acknowledge what I’d done and would lay the blame on everyone else. I didn’t want to hold myself responsible for taking someone’s life over something so trivial and stupid. You blame everyone else because you don’t want to deal with the pain. Eventually I realized that to grow up and be able to call myself a man I had to look this lady in the eye and tell her what I had done. I needed to try and make amends.Whether she forgave me or not was not the point.”

It is truly all about the framing. Oshea could have viewed apologizing for his crime and all of the pain he caused as a weakness, as something only cowards do. Instead, he realized that this took courage and maturity. It was not easy, but it has allowed him to use the senseless act of crime to help others avoid his mistakes. Acknowledging, admitting, even accepting and embracing our flaws and imperfections is what will enable us to become the best versions of ourselves. It is our drive to be perfect that can paralyze us from action.

I wonder what would happen if we understood and internalized that we are ALL at different points of the same path. That we have years when we take more steps forward and other years when we take more steps back. That God is not perfect, therefore we should not and cannot expect ourselves to be perfect.Would this allow us to open our hearts and our souls to one another? Would this enable us to look another person in the eye and say “I am sorry” with meaning and conviction? Would facing ourselves with this level of chesed, of kindness, allow us to see the other with the same empathy?

Our machzor teaches that, “For sins against God, the day of atonement atones, but for sins from one human being to another, the day of atonement does not atone until we have made amends with each other.” This very important text leaves out one integral part of the scenario.We cannot embark on the work or the lessons of t’shuva until we learn to treat ourselves with kindness and compassion. Until we are able to admit and forgive our own wrongdoings. Then, and only then, will we be able to look kindly on each other. This is our challenge in the coming year, this is our path to move forward.

Katy Kessler 9/30/19 Katy Kessler 9/30/19

Rosh HaShanah: Youth-Led Creative Service

Sermon by Rabbi Tobias Moss
2019/5780

Un’taneh Tokef. Let us proclaim the sacred power of this day, awesome, full of dread.

Who by fire? Who by water? Who by slow decay? Who by moose?

Who by moose?! No, that wasn’t said out loud. That was in my own reading as I thought of what was my closest call, closest brush with death during the past year.

Who by moose?

I began this summer with a 1,700 mile drive from my home in New York City to my new one here in Minneapolis. Accompanied by two of my most adventurous friends, we took the scenic route, driving on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes. It was beautiful and I was full of excitement for this transition, for joining Temple Israel, for leaving the crowded Big Apple and coming to the Land of Lakes.

As we started to drive Superior’s northern shore, a new traffic sign was spotted popping up along the road: yellow signs with muscular antler-clad animals in mid-gallop. These weren’t like the slender deer signs I’ve known in suburban New Jersey. There were two words posted below the image: night danger. But sometimes you see a sign without understanding its significance. So we drove along after the sun had set.

I was behind the wheel when, out of the darkness, only some yards in front of the car,

I suddenly identified a cluster of skinny legs and hulking bodies. I was horrified and confused about why people would cross a highway at such a dangerous spot.

My instinctive reactions took over as I swerved out of the way. We pulled over and caught our breath. The three of us pieced the image together. We had just barely dodged two humongous black-furred moose. They were nearly invisible on the dark highway. As far as I’m aware, though one never knows for sure, that was my closest brush with death from the past year. Who by moose?

Now were I to try to further update Leonard Cohen’s “Who by Fire,” itself an update on Un’taneh Tokef, “Who by moose?” just wouldn’t cut it. It doesn’t sound elegant enough; it’s not the way I’d choose to go. But then again, one of the points of this prayer is that in real life we don’t know how, we don’t know where, we don’t know when we will go. However, at this awesome time of year we muster the collective courage to ask the question who by this, who by that?

At last year’s asking of “who by fire,” no one could have known the answers: which house would have a freak electrical fire and everyone wouldn’t make it out, that the Amazon would burn with unprecedented intensity; that in nearby Duluth, Adas Israel’s 118-year old synagogue

and eight Torah scrolls would go up in flames just weeks before this year’s High Holy Days.

And as for the coming year, we know that tragedy, or if we’re lucky, only adversity, will certainly befall us. So once again we ask: Who by this? Who by that? Come on God, come on Judaism, give us a roadmap for the year to come! We get none.

We hear no answers to those explicit questions of the poem. But we do hear an answer to unspoken questions. What shall we do in advance of such tragedies? What shall we do after they come to pass? We don’t get a roadmap, but we do get direction.

וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רעַ הַגְּזֵרָה

T’shuvah, t’filah, and tzedakah will temper the severity of the decree.

Repentance, prayer, and righteous giving will ease the hardship of what’s to come.

It is not a detailed roadmap, but it is a compass, a way to navigate during these ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and in the year to come. Three stars to follow:

T’shuvah – repentance

T’filah – prayer

Tzedakkah – righteous giving

However, just learning a bit of orienteering doesn’t mean it is easy to get where you want to go. They don’t erase the hardships of life. They temper them, reshape them, help us to make meaning, move beyond the bad to experience more of the good.

I’ve learned about these three guiding principles from two of the most Minnesotan things I’ve done during my first few months here.

The challenge to “temper the hardship of the decree” was the central theme that I encountered during my obligatory first pilgrimage to the Guthrie Theater—you see Minneapolis caught my eye not just for its proximity to lakes and moose, but also the acclaimed theater scene.

At the Guthrie, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage debuted her newest play about a truck stop sandwich shop, Floyd’s. The whole play takes place in the sandwich shop kitchen where ex-convicts are striving for two goals with equal fervor: repentance and the perfectsandwich.

Three young cooks were recently released from jail, but are struggling with the stigma they receive from the outside world and their own persisting guilt. They are easily set off when someone brings up their past, and they have great concern they’ll fall into bad habits. These three look up to a wiser and older cook, Montrellous, who seems to have moved beyond his own troubled past.

“Look here, being incarcerated took a little something from all of us. Cuz you left prison don’t mean you outta prison. But, remember everything we do here is to escape that mentality. This kitchen, these ingredients, these are our tools. We have what we need.”

This is the Jewish belief. We have what we need. T’shuvah is possible.

My teacherRabbi Larry Hoffman notes that one biblical description of sin is that it is a burden that weighs us down. God nosei avon, lifts up, that burden. If God removes the burden on a person, then so must society practice forgiveness, then so must we each practice forgiveness with ourselves.

T’shuvah is largely about dealing with our past. This season’s second guiding principle,T’filah, prayer—especially petitional prayer—is how we express our hopeful reaching out towards our future. We allow our souls to express our deepest desires. We join together with our people to do the same.

Throughout the play, the cooks come together for their own sort of communal ritual as they prepare simple sandwiches. They dream. They daydream. They dream out loud about discovering the ultimatesandwich!

“Cubano sandwich, with sour pickles, jalapeno aioli and . . . and sweet onions!”

“Grilled blue cheese with spinach, habaneros and . . . candied apples.”

“Maine lobster, potato roll gently toasted and buttered with roasted garlic, paprika and cracked pepper, mayo, caramelized fennel, and a sprinkle of . . . of . . . dill,”

(I knew I’d have to do this sermon on Rosh HaShanah, because this would be too painful to hear on Yom Kippur.)

Rafael asks: “Can the perfect sandwich be made?”

Letitia asks: “When we get there, will we know?”

And again, the wisest among them, Montrellous, responds: “We can only strive for the harmony of ingredients. That’s all.”

Here in synagogue, we don’t usually dream together of the perfect sandwich.

We dream of a world perfected.

We pray for peace.

We pray for community.

We pray for healing.

Our prayers don’t get answered in a direct or explicit fashion, but as Montrellous suggests, we nonetheless strive towards these ideals in our daily lives, though we do not know whether we’ll ever achieve our ultimate aims.

As 20th century Reform Rabbi Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman eloquently puts it: “Prayer cannot mend a broken bridge, rebuild a ruined city, or bring water to parched fields. Prayer can mend a broken heart, lift up a discouraged soul, and strengthen a weakened will.”

To elucidate our third guiding principle, tzedakah, righteous giving, I’d like to share a lesson from an unexpected place, from my most Minnesotan day here: the State Fair! We don’t have that sort of thing where I come from.

The fair’s nickname is the Great Minnesota Get Together. It seems to me that this has at least two meanings, the first being all the people that get together, and the second being all the subjects, themes, and attractions that get brought together. You can learn about the latest in organic lawn care or you can eat a deep fried waffle-encrusted breakfast sandwich on a stick—I don’t think that’s the perfect sandwich. You can walk through an art gallery made of corn kernels, or, as I did, you can spend half an afternoon learning how honey is made.

Rabbeinu Bachya, an 11th century Rabbi, writes in his book Chovot HaLevavot, Duties of the Heart, that one has the internal duty to see the world not just as it plainly seems to be, but to seek lessons from nature. We should observe and contemplate the natural world, and deduce Divine wisdom from this practice. And so in the middle of the State Fair I asked myself, and the beekeeper, what I could learn from the bees.

There are many other types of bees. There’s the bumble bee, carpenter bee, mason bee, leafcutter bee, and sweat bee, not to mention wasps, hornets, and other, meaner varieties.

When it comes to honey production, these other bee species are stingy. They only produce enough to survive day by day. When winter comes, the entire hive dies, every worker bee dies, save for the queen who hibernates alone for the winter, and then starts the hive from scratch in the spring.

But the honeybee does things differently. Even once they’ve made enough honey to keep the hive alive, they just keep going. They can end up making three, four, five times as much honey as they’ll ever consume.

Thanks to this generous spirit, if you will, when winter comes, even here in Minnesota, the hive survives along with queen. Thanks to this generous spirit, humans can enjoy from the honey surplus, without harming the health of the hive.

Likewise, for us, tzedakah helps our community survive the winter, the weak along with the powerful. Tzedakah is also how we share the sweetness of life.

Tzedakah is too often translated as charity, which limits the idea to only material giving. While our tradition does challenge us to do with less and give more, it also invites us to recognize the other bounties we have to share as well. Here the Bible’s Book of Proverbs teaches another lesson from the honey bee.

צוּף־דְּבַשׁ אִמְרֵי־נֹעַם מָתוֹק לַנֶּפֶשׁ וּמַרְפֵּא לָעָצֶם׃

Pleasant words are an overflowing honeycomb

Sweet to the soul, healing for the bones.

As you eat your High Holy Day honey, don’t just revel in the sweetness of the moment, but also let the honey serve as a guide. As you enjoy the surplus that the bees made, what surplus do you have that you can offer as tzedakah? What can you do to help the hive survive the winter, the weak along with the powerful? How you can help the community not only survive, but also taste life’s sweetness during these ten days and throughout the coming year?

One day we will all reach our end. Some of us by fire, some by water, some by slow decay, but hopefully none of us by moose, since we all now know what those “night danger” signs mean.

Jewish tradition acknowledges this human reality, our human frailty. Rather than let it halt us in our tracks, we do not experience our mortality as a dead end, that there is nowhere left to go because of it.

Un’taneh Tokef concludes:

Our origin is from dust

And our end is to dust.

But God,

You are beyond description.

Your holy name suits You

And You suit your Name,

And somehow we are named After You.

May Adonai Eloheinu, the Eternal Source of Strength, give strength to Am Yisrael the People Israel and all humanity, as we navigate the New Year to come. We have no roadmap, but we do have these three stars to follow. T’shuvah, T’filah, Tzedakah. Repentance, Prayer, and Righteous Giving.

Shanah Tovah.

Katy Kessler 9/30/19 Katy Kessler 9/30/19

Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2019/5780

A couple of weeks ago Barb and I saw a wonderful film about the origins and history of Fiddler on the Roof. Among the extraordinary facts about one of the world’s most famous musicals is that since it first premiered in September of 1964, Fiddler on the Roof has played on a stage somewhere in the world every single day, including Vienna, Mexico City, Iceland, and even Japan!

My favorite moment from the documentary was when they showed clips from the Tokyo production of Fiddler. The scene where Golde brings Tevye his Shabbat sushi is just precious… and the accompanying musical number:

This fish - it’s not - gefilte!

Gefilte - this fish it - is not!

Ok, I made that up . . . But there really was a Tokyo production and the lyricist, Sheldon Harnick, attended a performance, and after the show he was asked by some of the cast members: Do they understand this show in America? It is so Japanese! And then there’s the delightful snippet of the Temptations singing “If I Were a Rich Man.”And a recent production of the play by Harlem schoolchildren in New York.

Fiddler on the Roof may be a musical about the precarious nature of Jewish life in the Eastern European shtetl, but the message of the documentary was that Fiddler belongs to the world. Turns out that being uprooted from one’s homeland and forced to forge a new existence in a distant unknown land is not limited to the Jewish national experience. Nor is the celebration of life, or the desire to see one’s children find happiness in their relationships, or the importance of keeping alive one’s traditions! Fiddler endures because nearly every culture on Earth has gone through upheaval, including our own current American 21st century experience.

Throughout history, the Jew has had an uncanny way of capturing both the admiration and the loathing of host countries. Rabbi Zimmerman brought back from her Eastern Europe trip some popular Polish talismans, or good luck charms. One of them – this one is of the little Yiddl with a fiddle clutching a 1 grosz coin – a Polish penny. This is not a relic from the 2nd World War era. You can buy this on a Warsaw street corner today!

Perhaps the fascination with the all-at-once precarious yet successful Jew is in how we represent so many elements of human nature. As someone once said: “The Jews are like everybody else, only more so!” The urge to prosper and be secure and strong versus feeling the abject fear of rootlessness and vulnerability. Perhaps because we celebrate life so intensely and mourn death so deeply. Perhaps because we have suffered so immensely, but remain so steadfastly determined to choose life, and to battle suffering and oppression when we witness it anywhere to anyone. Because we sing about the sunrise and the sunset and swiftly flying years – One season following another, laden with happiness and tears…

Or maybe it is because we are so overtly familiar to people. We wind up being the mirrors of self-love and self-hate. And strangely enough, at .17% of the world’s population, our welfare winds up being the barometer of the health of any given society in which we dwell.

New York Times journalist Bari Weiss, who became Bat Mitzvah at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh 20 years ago, writes about how when a society is in decline, anti-Semitism takes root. Societies in which hatred in general – and anti-Semitism in particular – thrives are societies that are dead or dying. Why is that? Because anti-Semitism is the ultimate conspiracy theory – so it thrives in a society that has replaced truth with lies. Anti-Semitism, she writes, is an intellectual disease, a thought virus – as long as the body is healthy the virus doesn’t cause trouble. But when the body is ill the virus breaks out!

This we should consider relevant, because our own American social immune system is in a weakened state. When we witness these sporadic but increasing incidents of hatred, we know that our nation is in trouble. We have witnessed Charlottesville in our own time. Pittsburgh. And in today’s political climate, not very far from our front doors, elected officials can make anti-Semitic statements and survive politically!For some of us this is a new phenomenon, for others it is 2,000 + years old.

The synagogue fire in Duluth turned out not to be a hate crime, but there was a collective holding of breath for the two days until that information was made public, and I don’t think it was the Jewish community’s fear alone that made it front page news. I think the people of this state were determinedly interested in knowing where we are headed! When a synagogue goes up in flames, the world takes note.

The Tevye character in the most recent production of Fiddler enters the stage wearing a contemporary red parka as though he has just gotten off a raft crossing the Mediterranean. The characters’ accents are minimal as though to suggest: This is everybody’s story!

The Fiddler on the Roof documentary concludes with a striking series of photographs of refugees around the world in search of a new and secure home juxtaposed with the closing scenes of the Jews leaving Anatevka, followed by classic pictures of Jews being loaded into German boxcars and the liquidation of the ghettos.

These are stark reminders that although we may have, as a people, endured some of the worst suffering in human history, an increase in hate and a wanton disregard for the plight of refugees are harbingers of societies in decline.

So it did not seem much of a stretch for the leadership of Temple Israel Minneapolis to take in an undocumented Nigerian man and provide sanctuary for him as he sought to evade ICE agents determined to deport him. Felix lived with us on the third floor of this building for six weeks before he endeavored to return to his workplace so as to have the health care required by his ailing wife. No sooner did this loyal employee arrive on the job than he was picked up by ICE; he now sits in a detention center in Elk River awaiting an uncertain future.

And it doesn’t seem such a stretch to learn that one young member of our congregation gained knowledge of a family separated, with mother and daughter living here, while their 7-year-old son remains caged in a detention center on our southern border, and came to us asking for assistance. We arranged to have him basically ransomed, released and flown up here to join his family.

And it doesn’t seem such a stretch for this holy place to be assisting a family from Central America seeking a better life for their children in finding a place to sleep at night.

I know it may appear to many Americans that we are a more secure nation by breaking up migrant families, throwing children into detention camps, and deporting long-time residents who are richly contributing to our society. And I know there are those who believe that teaching each other to fear the foreigner – and each other – is good for the health and welfare of this country. I’m here to tell you, and I am the one with the microphone, that it is not! It is that same virus eating away at the American body. And nobody knows the consequences of that societal malady as intimately as the Jewish people do.

Sadly, I heard from members of this congregation after Pittsburgh that they were scared to come into our building. On the other hand, there were close to 2,000 people of many faiths and backgrounds who assembled here in defiance of hatred following that tragedy.

I believe people see themselves defined in the pages of our Jewish story. They feel the precarious nature of being human saw themselves in the telling of our personal tragedy. For at least a couple of days, everybody in town was fiddling on the roof.

Another interesting piece of Fiddler trivia, about which I was previously unaware, is that the original score contained an upbeat song toward its conclusion called “The Messiah Will Come.”

There is an old Broadway tradition known as the 11 o’clock song which they place a show-stopper number that wakes up the sleepy theater goers to keep their attention through the end of the show (much as a rabbi might do at this very moment in his sermon!).

In Fiddler the song you’ve never heard was called When Messiah Comes, and it goes something like this:

When Messiah comes he will say to us

I apologize that I took so long,

But I had a little trouble finding you,

Over here a few and over there a few

You were hard to reunite

But everything is going to be all right

Up in heaven there, how I wrung my hands

When they exiled you from the promised land

Into Babylon you went like castaways

On the first of many, many moving days.

What a day and what a blow!

How terrible I felt you’ll never know!

When Messiah comes he will say to us:

Don’t you think I know what a time you had?

Now I’m here you’ll see how quickly things improve, and

You won’t have to move unless you want to move

You shall never more take flight,

Yes, everything is going to be alright!

The song never made it into the show. The familiar story of Tevye and his family ends on a tragic note of being forced out of their home in search of a new and more secure future. Fiddler is one of the few musicals that doesn’t end on a happy note.

This is the universal message of the Jewish story that people of all faiths know in the deepest recesses of their hearts – We do not live in a Messianic world.We are still waiting for it! Working for it! And if we give into hatred and fear of the other, if we allow that virus to invade the body of humanity, then indeed, the whole world will know what it means to leave Anatevka in search of a new home…

On Rosh HaShanah, the birthday of the world, may we come closer to one another, and in doing so may we recognize all that the people of the world hold in common, far more than what separates us. The love of children, the deep devotion to long-standing traditions, a sense of humor, the fear of homelessness, a love of music, a will to live in freedom, and a desire for life! - L’chaim!

Katy Kessler 9/29/19 Katy Kessler 9/29/19

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2019/5780

Just this past month, a number of us from Temple went to Eastern Europe. We traveled through the places that our ancestors once lived and where so many died in the Holocaust. We went to Terezin, we went to Auschwitz and Birkenau. We went to the Jewish quarters of Prague and Budapest, of Warsaw and Krakow, of Berlin.

And when we were in Prague, I was reminded of the story of the golem. The golem of Prague – you might remember it. The Maharal, 16th-century rabbi of Prague, went to the banks of the river and took a clump of clay, and there, that clump of clay came to life. It was the golem. And all the fears of the Jewish people were placed on it. And then, it was put in the attic of the old New Synagogue, where our group stood and heard the story of the golem. The Maharal – 16th century: we stood in the very synagogue that he once taught in. I wondered at that time at the Maharal could ever imagine what would happen in that very city in that very Jewish quarter in the 1930s and 40s. I just wonder: could the Maharal ever imagine what happened from this past Rosh HaShanah last year to this one in our very country?

The Pittsburgh shooting, not long after the beginning of the new year last year. The shooting in California. The drive-by shooting in Miami that didn’t get a lot of press. But a drive-by shooter went past a synagogue; nobody was hurt. And then, there was the interruption of a few people: one in Las Vegas and the other in Washington state, whose activities on the internet were suspicious enough and extreme enough that the police took action. It was all against the Jews.

I remember going out this time and looking at the ladder that went to the window of the attic, where the golem is supposed to live, and I wondered, for just a moment, how can we not let fear enter our hearts?

Fear. Fear, for me, is something that we need to talk about. Fear is something that plagues us with all the increased anti-Semitism and hatred in the world, racism, Islamophobia, sexism. Just thinking about standing right here, right now: fear. Fear that I might have talked about fear in another sermon that you all are remembering, because I know I’ve done it before! Fear that maybe you’re waiting in this sanctuary for the sermon that you think I should give tonight, and that I will hear from you in my voicemail tomorrow! Fear.

Everywhere I go, I am asked about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. I’m asked about her election and the tweets and what I think. I’m asked about Israel and Netanyahu and the election. I’m asked about President Trump. I’m asked. And I was going to sidestep even mentioning all those people, thinking maybe it wasn’t wise. But then I realized I was afraid. And that I didn’t want to give in to.

Now fear is interesting because every year I hear that some of you out there are afraid that I’m going to trip walking back and forth in my heels! Don’t worry, I won’t.

Fear, fear, fear: it can grab us. It can take over our lives. And the opposite of fear is curiosity. It is being wondrous, thinking about things. So I want to take this Rosh HaShanah to be curious about fear. I’m going to take this opportunity to look at fear, but don’t worry – I’ll get you to your dinners on time. Don’t look at your watches…

The Hebrew language is pretty amazing because it helps us understand the different kinds of fear. Fear itself is not good or bad – no emotion is good or bad. The tale that is told is what we do with it. And that is a reality. So what are we going to do with that fear? That makes all the difference in the world.

In Hebrew, there are two words for fear. One is pachad, which means to react, so respond. And the other is yirah, which is connected to awe, or reverence. So what fear are we going to choose?

The gunman in Pittsburgh chose pachad. He chose to demonize a people, anybody, to make up for his own fears. We are told that, actually, we all have an aversion to fear. We want to put our heads in the sand and deny that there’s fear – deny that there’s anything wrong. We so often want to not deal with what is out there. And that is human, that is understandable.

When this kaleidoscope of emotions and thinking come after us that create this anxiety in our hearts, we often want to find a simple answer for the complexity of the world and the complexity of who we are as human beings. And so what we do in those cases is find an easy answer, even if it isn’t based in reality. We will find someone to blame for the ills of the world. And that is what we often do, just naturally with our fear. But we are human beings who have the capability of doing something much more than just allowing ourselves to give in to fear. We have everything at our disposal, but it doesn’t come naturally – we’ve gotta work at it. And we have to help our children understand it.

FDR said the only thing to fear is fear itself. Do you know when he said those words? In 1933, in his first presidential inauguration. We knew not many years later, there was a lot to fear. Pachad… It is giving in to that fear to try and control it.

There’s a great saying that says you’re perfect the way you are, but you need a lot of work. That is working on our fear. It is making ourselves not side-step it, or blame and shame others, but it is leaning in to it. It is finding the positive in fear.

So I am here to promote fear. I think fear is good. Fear is powerful. Fear is protective.

Rabbi Steven Kushner tells us that actually, fear is God-given. It tells us to be safe, to be careful of the cliff that’s in front of us. Fear tells us that when we touch a hot stove to not touch it again! Fear protects us, and that is a powerful reality. Fear is a powerful reality, and we can look at it as it bombards us with the reality of the day.

Dr. Jennifer Kunst actually tells us in her work Wisdom from the Couch – she’s a Kleinian psychoanalyst – she tells us that we have to change the game. She says that so often, we as individuals, we are in a game of dodgeball.

Somebody’s angry or upset and they’re throwing the ball as hard as they can to get us out. There are many balls coming at us over and over harder and harder. And what’s our response? To throw back just as hard! To find a way for our team against their team. And we are going to play this game until the end.

She reminds us that we have to change the rules of the game. That when somebody throws us a ball that is so hard and full of fear, that we have to actually be like a baseball catcher. We have to hold the intensity of that ball, of that feeling. Of that intensity. And we have to help people understand that we’re going to hold it, to take the sting out of it, and we’re going to take the power out of it. But we’re not going to hold on to it. It’s not ours. It’s not our fear.

We’re going to toss it back to the one who owns it. We’re going to help each other because we’re on the same team. To be on the same team is to be on the human team. And that’s where yirah comes in – the idea of awesome fear, of reverence in fear. In understanding at the beginning of our liturgy that fear is about humility and not being bigger than life, but finding our smallness. Understanding there’s something beyond us.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who is the head Rabbi of Great Britain, brilliant man, wrote a book called The Dignity of Difference. What he tells us is that fear is crucial. Fear motivates us when we walk outside our home and see a swastika carved in a tree in a local park. Fear reminds us that we have to act. Fear reminds us that we have to respond to hatred; that we need to find the dignity of our own people, and that racism and anti-Semitism and sexism and Islamophobia will never truly be a solution and we know that.

So in The Dignity of Difference, Jonathan Sacks tells us that actually, we have to be open to seeing the difference in the world. Because our God is one, we see the diversity of humanity. Because our one God created the diversity of this world, every ecosystem knows it. You don’t live as a reality of nature unless you have diversity. It’s where it’s vibrant. Technicolor life and beautiful. He reminds us that tribalism is really not the answer. Because it tells us that we don’t want to see difference. Nationalism is not the answer according to him because that also reminds us that it’s an “us and them” game. He tell us Plato, who gave us universalism – we cry the same tears – is not the answer anymore. Because the beauty of our differences is something that we honor.

Pastor Danny Givens reminds us, when he spoke to a group of people at Temple Israel in a courageous conversation, that he doesn’t want to be like everyone else, the universal humanity. Because the bottom line is the dominant culture decides what’s universal. He’s proud of being a black man. He said in that same sentence, you all are proud to be Jews. If I said we’re all like Christians, you would be offended. If I said I do not recognize that kippah, you would not like that. And after Pittsburgh, I decided to put on a kippah for the first time to show the love and diversity of our uniqueness as Jews and my pride in being Jewish in response to hatred towards our people.

Rabbi Sacks goes on and says that what is truly important is for us to be curious. Remember that: the opposite of fear is curiosity. For us to be open to learn about other cultures. Ultimately, for us to not only understand but to be able to accommodate and acclimate to other traditions and cultures who see the world so differently than we do.

When I first came to Temple Israel, we did this program on diversity. We each got a little piece of paper, and some people got “your culture doesn’t look in anybody’s eyes because you believe God lives in the eyes, and looking at another person’s eye is disrespectful.” Others got, “you come from a culture where human interaction is looking eye-to-eye.” Another group talked to people about their feelings openly while another group said little, for they believed that in silence there is honor.

Then, they put us all in a room and said talk to each other, converse, mingle. So I was in a group who was talking to people eye-to-eye with someone who was looking at the floor. It was very difficult; I didn’t understand. In that exercise is a petri dish of what it means to be in a diverse world. It isn’t easy; no one said it was. But the yirah, the awe of something beyond us, the idea that we as Jews and human beings are humbled and small and therefore we don’t have the answer, but there are many truths . . . that is the true sense of which fear I want.

I want a fear that helps me understand the awe of the world. I want a fear that helps me understand that we as human beings are complicated and that those complications are something to take in, to not try and find the answer but to sit in the confusion and have a mature sensibility about being in a community. I want a fear that is awesome and full of dread – that’s what these high holy days are all about.

Sitting in the ghetto in Krakow, we learned about a non-Jewish pharmacist who was the only non-Jew allowed in the Krakow ghetto. He was an incredible man. He knew that if he wasn’t there that people would get sick, and they wouldn’t die a natural death, that the Nazis would have killed them. He knew; he and the women he employed kept hair coloring so that they colored the hair of elderly Jews so they looked younger. He and many others were planning an uprising in April of 1942, but the Krakow ghetto was liquidated in March, and it was never to be. He survived, he wrote a book, and he documented what happened.

That is fear of awe. That is speaking truth to power; that is validating a people who are too often minimized and hated. But we—we will always have yirah – the fear of awe, of our pride of being Jewish, yirah allows us to be open and free, and in response to the Pittsburgh shooting we opened our doors within 24 hours and had 2,000 people. Neighbors, clergy of all backgrounds here in this sanctuary. I wasn’t going to let pachad, the minimizing fear, take over us.

We joined our voices and made possible yirah. Awe and reverence. Shanah Tovah.

Katy Kessler 9/28/19 Katy Kessler 9/28/19

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Nefesh Service

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2019/5780

I’ve always had a thing for the Beatles. I used to love the lyrics: When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now! Really? Will you still need me, will you still feed me? When I’m 64?!

OK, so for the record, on August 22nd of this summer I turned 64 and I can still feed myself! Paul wrote that song when he was 17 years old and I’m guessing 64 seemed really old to him. Paul is now 77 years old, and here I am, 64, and still yakking about the Beatles.

Amazingly, all that great music the Beatles wrote, music that literally changed the world, happened over the brief span of seven years. The movie Yesterday which came out this summer cleverly imagines a world in which the Beatles never existed and how different a place that would be. The first photograph of the Beatles together was taken on, yes, August 22nd of 1962 and the very last picture of the fab four together was taken on, believe it or not, August 22nd of 1969!

I have often wondered through the years, what gave the fab four such staying power? One possibility is that the members of that band were able to reinvent themselves at every turn. They went from rock and roll to folk to pop to psychedelia to mash-ups of all the above, ultimately creating styles never heard before.

If I have learned anything over the past 64 years or so, it is that while time becomes ever more precious with each passing year, it is never too late to reinvent oneself. You are never too young or too old to seek out a new way of being.

On Rosh HaShanah we celebrate creation, and we celebrate the human ability to recreate or reinvent ourselves. To become something new. To follow dreams, to change errant ways, to forgive, to move on.

Rosh HaShanah represents a singular moment in time. We are in the sweet spot! The past is finished and the future has not yet begun. And for ten days we hover magically in-between, very much like when converts to Judaism go to the Mikveh – the ritual bath – and suspend themselves in the waters for that brief moment. For that instant they are not who they were before, and not yet who they are going to be, and it is a special moment. Fleeting, but special.

Rosh HaShanah proclaims: Today the world is born, today we begin again! Walk into an orthodox shul on Kol Nidre and you might find the male Jews wearing kittels – the traditional burial shrouds. They take this rebirth thing fairly seriously. The past dies that night, and we are reborn at the closing of the gates.

Americans take this seriously too. Statistically, the average American changes professions 7 times over the course of their lives. Not seven jobs, seven careers!

You can see reinvention everywhere. I thought of the screenwriter who became a rabbi at the age of 54. Or President George HW Bush trying out skydiving at the age of 91. Or Gladys Burrill who ran the Honolulu Marathon at the age of 92. Or one of my personal faves, Susan Boyle, mocked for her appearance and her age and her silly dream of becoming a singing star when she came onto the Britain’s Got Talent stage at 47 years old: she ended up stunning the world with her version of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Mis and signing an album deal.

Temple Israel has been busy reinventing itself over the last decade or so with a principal interest in being a warm and welcoming place, because we sensed that this is what the members of our congregation were yearning for.

In business they call reinvention an “adjacency strategy.” Moving to the next step to keep with the times. An interesting case in point is the Nokia company. It began by producing rubber boots and through a series of reinventions wound up in the telecommunications business.

I recalled what I once heard about Laura Ingalls Wilder who, as a woman growing up in the late 19th century, never believed she would do much more than help around the farm and bear children. Her many attempts at writing were rejected by publishers, but she persisted and finally published her first work Little House on the Big Woods when she was 65 years old.

I thought of the many retirees I have met here at Temple who investigate all sorts of new realities when they leave positions they have had for years. And how many of them are drawn to helping others less fortunate.

Reinvention comes in many forms. I thought of Oshea Israel and Mary Johnson-Roy who were here with us for Selichot Saturday night. Mary’s son was murdered by Oshea, who was given a second degree murder sentence. Mary’s first response was who is this animal who killed my child? But then she encountered his mother who asked her to forgive her son his terrible deed. She decided to visit Oshea in prison where they talked for two hours and he repeatedly said how sorry he was that he had taken her son’s life. He asked if he could hug her and as they hugged, Mary said she felt something rising from her soles and leaving her. Her hatred for this young man left her. The two are now neighbors and they travel together telling their story. An almost unbelievable act of reinvention and forgiveness.

I thought of Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist, and her challenge last week to the UN General Assembly to wake up and change old established habits and antiquated solutions. She implored: How dare you suggest that the problem can be solved with just business as usual? The eyes of the youth are upon you – change is coming whether you like it or not. Every day we see the growing ranks of the next generation calling on us to either reinvent our relationship with the physical planet, or get out of their way!

Much of what we read in the news today peddles despair. If it bleeds, it leads. But every so often, you see a hopeful piece. The NY Times recently ran an article by Al Gore on climate change called It’s Not Too Late. The article jumped off the page to be read because it was one of the few messages that doesn’t make one despair. It affirms the long standing Rosh HaShanah tradition that human beings are capable of reinventing themselves and embracing change for the common good!

The cynical biblical author Ecclesiastes (from which we sang “Turn, Turn, Turn” earlier on) famously said that there is nothing new under the sun. Everything has been done already. He was so wrong. Every second offers us the opportunity to reinvent, to effect change, to “take a sad song and make it better.”

Every year we get ten full days’ worth of that moment. In the next ten days, you do not need to be saddled with what you have done up to this point; the future is not already preordained. It is yours to design! This is the moment to reinvent ourselves.

There is no stage of life when you cannot ask yourself: What is my life’s purpose? And if the answer no longer speaks the truth to you, then reinvention might be a good move.

Did you know that you can have a second Bar or Bat Mitzvah at the age of 83? Because Judaism determines 70 as the age of wisdom, thirteen years later you can be called to the Torah yet again! It is as though wisdom means “today is the first day of the rest of my life!” One is never too old to begin again! Or, as a well-known Jewish Minnesota musician who reinvented himself several times used to say: Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

So here we are, poised at the beginning of a new year with yet another opportunity to reinvent ourselves. To value our days and use the time granted to us wisely. And every minute counts.

To realize the value of one year, ask a student who has failed a grade. To realize the value of a month, ask a mother who has given birth to a premature child. To realize the value of one week, ask the editor of a Sunday paper. To realize the value of one hour, ask lovers who are waiting to meet one another. To realize the value of a second, ask a person who narrowly avoided a car accident. To realize the value of a millisecond, ask someone who has won a silver medal.

Remember, on this holy day we affirm that the past is finished, and the future has not yet begun. This is our week to hover in the beautiful moment of being “in between.” Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift! That’s why it’s called the present.

Katy Kessler 9/19/18 Katy Kessler 9/19/18

Kol Nidre: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2018/5779

I decided for this Yom Kippur to go back to the basics – feeling remorseful, forgiveness, reconciliation – and I wanted to begin this sermon with a personal kind of everyday experience. When I thought of all the examples, of which there are many, don’t get me wrong. Times I needed to feel remorseful or forgiven. I thought about my family and I thought, I’m not going to make public what happens in my home. I thought about people who are angry at me at Temple because I didn’t do something right; there are many. But I thought displaying that publically might not be in the best taste – I’d have to ask forgiveness, by the way. So I came into Temple this afternoon and I sat down and a Rabbi goes to somebody who is very close, right? My Executive Assistant, Diana. And I say, “Diana, can you give me an example of a time I did something that I needed to ask for your forgiveness? And she goes, ‘You mean like yesterday?’ And I’m like, yeah, what happened yesterday? ‘Well, Rabbi, you were in my space and you called it an archaeological dig. And then I had to go get something out of your car that you forgot and guess what? It was an archaeological dig.’ Sorry, Diana.

So the idea of being remorseful is the centerpiece of Yom Kippur. There’s a story about God sending an angel down to Earth to find the most precious thing in the world. So the angel goes down and brings back a smile from parents looking at their newborn child. God says, “It’s precious, but it is not the most precious.”

The angel goes back down and brings the song of the nightingale. “No,” God says. “Go back.”

The angel brings back a young person walking an elderly person walking across a crowded street. “No,” says God.

The angel is searching and searching on this earth and all of a sudden hears the cry of an adult man. A man, crying. The angel steps aside to watch what’s happening and the man is crying because he said harsh words to his brother and feels so terrible.

So the angel takes one tear and brings it to God and God says, “Yes. The tear of remorse is the most precious thing on this earth.”
We know this; we just read it. We will read many more tomorrow. For the sin that I have committed against you, openly and in secret. The sin that I have committed against you inadvertently. The sin that I have committed against you under duress.

Judaism understands that impact is over intention. Judaism understands that intention can be used as a defense, actually, and not taking responsibility like, “I didn’t mean it. No, it wasn’t something that I really knew that I was doing. I’m sorry!” Judaism says you have to apologize anyway. You have to apologize for the things you didn’t mean or the things you thought you didn’t mean, which is a class on Freud, which I’m not giving today.

So here we are. Impact over intention. It’s a powerful lesson about forgiveness.

A man – Christian Picciolini – you heard him here; he spoke here. He’s an incredible human being. He used to be a leader in a Nazi skinhead cell outside of Chicago. He was homophobic, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, he was racist; he hated anyone and everyone who was not white because he believed he was the victim.

One day, he was beating up a young black man only because he was black. And he all of a sudden caught a glimpse where he locked into the fear in this young man’s eyes. And then it was all over in the best of ways. Christian got out of his extremist life and he actually created a non-profit called Life After Hate where he actively brings people out of extremist organizations in order to turn their life around as he turned his life around. You can google him; it is amazing.

Impact over intention. That is one of the major precepts of Judaism.

A second precept of Judaism is that reconciliation without repentance and repair is actually nothing at all. It doesn’t hold together, meaning somebody has to do a lot of hard work in order for reconciliation to happen. It’s not easy.

Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times last Sunday wrote a piece about the #MeToo movement. She wrote a very interesting perspective on it. She said, as she was speaking about a whole array of people, that the people who have been accused of harassment – not the most egregious people but others – that she feels sorry for them. They’ve gotten caught up, but she realizes that they don’t actually feel sorry for the women that they might have offended. They actually don’t even think much about the women that they might have offended. And that is, according to Michelle, why the #MeToo movement of reconciliation hasn’t really gone very far. Because these men actually aren’t building restitution or reconciliation, they just want to be absolved of what they are accused of.

We know this kind of world, don’t we? In the Torah, long ago, Jacob and Esau teaches us the need for repentance and repair before reconciliation. You remember the story – good old Jacob stole Esau’s birthright and stole his blessing. And Esau’s a little upset – okay, he wants to kill his brother – and so Jacob leaves for a long time and becomes a very wealthy man. He has a lot of wives and he has a lot of kids and he has a lot of animals. And he decides to return and he is going to meet his brother Esau again. Perfect. Life is going pretty well. I’m going to do it. God says, “No, no, Jacob. You don’t get to do that. No. You go over here on the other side of the river.” And there, an angel wrestles with him.

We often look at Esau, we often talk about wrestling as this wonderful thing that the Jewish people do, but I think actually God made Jacob wrestle because he understood in order to be reunited with his brother, Jacob had some work in growing up to do. He had to feel the pain of what it means to have done something wrong even if, in the end, it works out okay. He had to take responsibility and so he wrestles with the angel, with the man, and guess what happens? He comes back, limping. He’s limping for the rest of his life and got a new name – he went from Jacob to Yisra'el the One Who Wrestles.

So here we have a patriarch who needed to learn the lesson of what it means to truly repent and repair in order to reconcile. He and his brother come back together. There are many debates whether there was really reconciliation or not, but the bottom line is they didn’t kill each other and that’s a good thing.

Rabbi Jonathan sacks says it is not an exaggeration that forgiveness is the most powerful implementation of human freedom. Forgiveness equals human freedom.

Another precept in Judaism is this idea that we have the ability to transform the experiences, the hurdles, the realities that are in our lives through forgiveness. That we don’t have to be our circumstances; that somehow we, as human beings, can find a way around our circumstances. He actually says that when tragedy hits and there is no hope, forgiveness is the answer.

Jean Quam, who is the Dean of the School of Education, gave a sermon this summer and introduced us to a man she met whose name is Ray Hinton. He wrote this book, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row.

Ray, as he is known, spent 30 years imprisoned on death row. He was innocent, completely innocent. And after 30 years, defended by Bryan Stevenson, a very well-known writer and lawyer, he walked out of that jail as an innocent man. The evidence did not add up; it never did.

Ray actually found this incredible ability to find freedom. He used his humor, his imagination, his wisdom, and intelligence. He actually broke through the incredible boundaries where each man on death row lived in their own cell. Ray would begin talking to people – they couldn’t see each other, but they would talk and he would make them laugh and he would talk about the things that he did and his family and they would talk about the things that they cared about and they spoke to each other when they were in their cells, when they were so lonely and isolated. And he broke through these incredible barriers. After a few years he decided to let go of his hate; he had lived with so much hate for a just -- an injustice system, as far as he was concerned. And so he found a way to say they can imprison my body, they can imprison my future, but they cannot imprison my soul.

He made friends with a man, Henry. And he found out that Henry actually was a leader in the KKK and was involved in a lynching of a young black man. Henry changed his ways by becoming friends with Ray. He said, Ray, the hatred that I was taught by my parents was just wrong. And on one visiting day, Henry introduces Ray to his father and says this is my friend. An African American man is my friend.

It’s an incredible story of redemption.

And Ray tells his fellow inmates that he is going to write a book when he gets out and he is going to tell their stories and he’s going to tell his story and he did. And he wrote this story by saying the sun does shine even when we don’t see it.

We all have heard these stories from the Holocaust. I have told Anna Orenstein’s story many times of her finding an apple core for her birthday in Auschwitz, eating it, savoring it, loving it. And she too survived a horror, just like Ray. And she, at 90-plus years old, still eats the core of every apple she has because it reminds her of miracles.

We know the power of forgiveness when we sit around a table and remember our loved ones, never telling their résumés, never telling their successes, but always a tear when you tell this story of forgiveness of a loved one and an I’m sorry at the end of life is so life-giving.

That is the most precious thing on this earth.

Forgiveness is redemptive. We know it, we’ve heard it, we as a people know it in our kishkas and we bring it forth.

Forgiveness is redemptive, but not without a limp, not without a severing. And you know what? That limp, that weakness as some might look at, is actually the core of our strength. We are Yisra'el, we are wrestlers, and we are wrestlers who come out of the fight proud of the limp that we have for the rest of time.

Gmar Chatimah Tova.

Katy Kessler 9/19/18 Katy Kessler 9/19/18

Yom Kippur: Truth

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2018/5779

When I was about the age of our TIPTY choir participants, in the year 1969, I fully and completely believed that Paul McCartney of the Beatles had died in an automobile accident. Paul was dead. There was proof of it! I had read all about it in several pop music magazines and even in major newspapers.

The clues were all there – the 28 IF license plate on the Volkswagen on the cover of Abbey Road (meaning that Paul would have been 28 years old “if” he had lived). And in that same picture Paul is dressed for burial, Ringo like a funeral director, George as a gravedigger, and John as God.

If you played parts of Revolution 9 on the white album backwards (a trick you can do with vinyl) you could hear the words “turn me on dead man.” The famous front cover of the Sgt. Pepper’s album features a left handed bass guitar in flowers on the ground like at a graveside. On the back cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, Paul is the only Beatle turned with his back to the camera. The song lyrics “without you” are right over his head.

At the fade out to the song Strawberry Fields Forever you can clearly hear John Lennon saying “I buried Paul.” On Magical Mystery Tour, three of the Beatles are wearing red carnations. Paul’s is black. Another photograph has Paul in uniform seated at a desk with a large sign in front of him that says in full caps: “I WAS.”

There were, in fact, hundreds of provocative clues indicating that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike contest winner. Clearly someone was trying to tell us something, and I was transfixed.

The only problem was… that it was total nonsense. Narishkeit as we say in French. Paul wasn’t dead. He’s still not dead. He is 74 and performing, live.

The reason I remember this so vividly almost 50 years later is because at the time, and for almost two full teenage years of my life, I completely believed it. It wasn’t until a few years later when they were talking about how idiotic all the fans had been to believe this stuff, that I realized I was one of those idiots!

The year this phony story broke we were living in Jerusalem. It was a year of uncertainty. We had uprooted from northern California – boom – to the Middle East. New friends, new language, new home, new schools: everything was turned on its head. Unlike the Israel of today, there was not a lot of English being spoken or printed so we were glued to the twice daily BBC broadcast and the Jerusalem Post weekly newspaper which I read cover to cover. I was eager for information and evidence of certainties and truths.

Everybody deals with anxious uncertainty in different ways. I remember that same year my father was smoking his way through two and a half packs of cigarettes every day. It was the brand where the company told you that real tough men smoked them. When we would beg him to kick the habit he would respond: “Don’t worry,” he’d say, “I’m too mean to die!” As it turned out, he was wrong. Convinced of his immortality by a corrupt tobacco industry peddling false facts… as hard truth… to sell their product.

We latch on to supposed truths because they make us feel better. We join chat rooms and receive Twitter feeds that confirm things we already believe. You see? I was right! If the information supports our point of view then it is true. If it does not then it is false. As weird as it sounds, “facts” are becoming relative.

The Colbert Report famously coined the word truthiness. Something that seems pretty truthful, but who cares if it is factual or not? He would joke: “I don’t like encyclopedias. They are elitist, telling us what is or isn’t true. What did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I want to say it happened in 1941, that’s my right…”

Colbert continued, “Ladies and gentlemen [the truth] comes from your gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than in your head? Look it up. Somebody’s gonna say I did look it up and it’s wrong. Well, mister, that’s because you looked it up in a book. Next time try looking it up in your gut.”

There is nothing new about people presenting things as facts that are simply not true. There have been many articles recently testifying to the “death of truth” in our time. But truth has been getting the shaft for centuries, and few groups of people in the world know the dangers of “false truths” as well as the Jewish people.

We are, after all, the children of Treblinka, the concentration camp that the Nazi propaganda machine portrayed to the world as a comfortable existence and a model of the benevolent protection the Third Reich gave their Jewish citizens.

We are the children of Alfred Dreyfuss, the French Jewish Captain accused falsely of treason in a famous trial in 1894. One that lasted 12 years and was viewed with fascination the world over by folks who believed in his guilt without any sound evidence.

We are the children of the blood libel, perhaps the oldest lie in human history. For 2,000 years, we were subject to the fraudulent accusation that we are Christ killers. We know the cost of absurd lies portrayed as truth.

And the beat goes on. Only this last year the Polish government sought to rewrite their own history, making it illegal to describe Polish death camps, or to assert that Polish citizens had any part in the Holocaust. Why the bold lie? To make people feel better about their origins, I suppose.

As we journey into the future, the accuracy of the historic past gets harder to prove. Today, nearly one-third of all Americans, and almost half of Millennials believe that substantially less than 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. And while there is evidence of over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos, more than half of Americans can’t name a single one. When you have that kind of gap in historical knowledge it is so easy to fill it with tripe.
We are also the children of a warming world. A world which contains an alarming number of people denying sound, factual, compelling climate science. Why? Because it is scary, and when we don’t want to think about something we invent “alternative facts.” We peddle it as the truth.

This is, of course, human nature. We all fall prey to falsehoods and misinformation. And every one of us carries around facts and stories about ourselves and others, only some of which are accurate.

I, for example, have told the story of my mother’s parents endless times, based on what my mom told me growing up. How they lived in the little village of Malsch. How, when things started going badly, her parents got her and her brother out but they were relocated to Gurs, a French internment camp in the Pyrenees, where they suffered for about two years, and then the train that took them directly to Auschwitz where they were killed the day they arrived.

I was telling this very story to Yehudit Shendhar, the assistant director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, a few years ago when she was here speaking. As I got to the part about the train going directly from the camp to Auschwitz she started shaking her head. “What?” I asked. “What?” She said: “That could not have happened.” And she recited some facts from her detailed studies indicating that no trains went directly from Gurs to Auschwitz.

This was stunning to me. Not only was the sacred history of my grandparents’ demise being called into question, but the reality was that I myself had been guilty of telling an inaccurate story about that crucial moment in history for almost half a century.

It made me wonder, how precise is any of the information encased in my skull? How much has been altered in the course of communication and my own fabrication? I’m a creative guy. I make stuff up!

It is human to bend and stretch information. The Torah and the Midrash themselves are stunning examples of the sages trying to make sense of a complex universe by making up stories.

Curiously, Judaism teaches that there are certain times that lying is allowed, even perhaps encouraged. To save a life, to prevent future harm to someone, even to exaggerate a point. In Genesis, even God lies. When Sarah laughs that her husband Abraham, at 90, is too old to father a child, God says “Oy, that is not going to play well with the old man!” And proceeds to tell Abraham that Sarah was laughing at her own inability to have children at her advanced age.

OK, so God didn’t say “oy.” I made that up.

It should be simple to spot the truth and to stop lying, right? As the Torah teaches, midvar sheker tirchak: “distance yourself from words of falsehood” or from the holiness code: lo t’cha’chashu v’lo t’shak’ru ish b’amito, “you shall not deceive or lie to one another.” It’s even one of the Ten Commandments: You shall not bear false witness.

To be human is to twist tales and exaggerate. But don’t present them as facts! As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.”

I remember seeing a church marquee that read: Avoid Truth Decay, Brush up on your Bible. We are emerging into an era of “truth decay.” A post-truth era that includes now familiar phrases such as “fake news” and “alternative facts” and “phony science.” We used to say, well, here is my opinion. Now we play hard and fast with facts, which is scary.

We live in an era of climate change deniers, birthers, and anti-vaxxers; history revisionists and internet trolls who talk on Facebook about fake Americans; even Facebook “likes” (thumbs up) are robot generated. Websites that present false facts about candidates in elections.

This has been exponentially accelerated by social media, which connects users with like-minded members and supplies us with customized news feeds that reinforce our preconceptions, allowing us to live in our increasingly narrow silos. Why do ads keep popping up on my computer for Pepto-Bismol and reissues of old Beatle albums? Because they know who I am and what I want!

I love my Google search and my Wikipedia. The democratization of information is quite appealing. But there is a danger in replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd,” blurring the lines between fact and opinion, between informed argument and blustering speculation. Oh yes, I am a big fan of the internet, but let’s remember: The internet is supposed to reflect and transmit reality, not create it!

What does it take to get something taken offline these days?

My brother and sister-in-law are therapists in Newtown, Connecticut and lived through two horrific years following Sandy Hook, consoling and counseling the bereft families. Alex Jones, the perverse bombastic radio personality who called Sandy Hook an invented political scam and who publically listed the address of a family he claims never lost their child, is only now finally losing his radio sponsors and stands to get yanked off the air once and for all.

Mark Zuckerberg, maybe the most influential businessman of his generation with 2.3 billion Facebook followers, refusing to take down posted Holocaust denial messages because their lies may not have been “intentional.” What’s that about? Why does it take a court case and the biggest-ever one day stock market nose dive to have something like that taken down off the net?

Our Jewish tradition encourages healthy dialogue. Vikuach, or argumentation, is actually a mitzvah. Maybe that is why Jews are such excellent doubters, skeptics, critics, and kvetches. These are legitimate parts of our faith. But competing facts? No.

Should we be concerned when those holding the highest positions in the land of the free are spewing baseless venom that is gobbled up by haters? Hannah Arendt notably wrote in 1951: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or Communist, but (ordinary) people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, between true and false, no longer exists.”

There are times when we just can’t handle the truth. But that doesn’t mean it should go away. There will always be a human attraction to false stories that soothe us in our ignorance, when the truth is too hard to swallow. It is human nature to do this!

This holiday of Yom Kippur is a holiday unlike any other in that it asks us to tell the truth about ourselves. To end the year-long embrace of fictions that let us get away with what we’ve done and said. Coming back every year, looking at our lives, stunned at how different we are from the year before. How we crafted stories and goals and dreams and how they didn’t come to fruition.

Over the years of my career I have given a few hundred eulogies, and every once in a great while someone will approach me after the service and say: “You know, that was a lovely eulogy… who were you talking about”? So I was comforted to read that in the Talmud one of the occasions you are permitted to lie is when you are writing a eulogy.

Why would that be? I think it’s because at the end of our life we want someone to tell a really good story about our years on this planet. We want our true lives to be about caring, and generosity and integrity. We want to inspire others who will come after us with things we actually said and did.

A year ago at this time we really had hopes to write a better story for ourselves, and then life got in the way… We made promises that were hard to keep. We said things to ourselves and to others that simply weren’t true. That’s the way we are wired.

On this holiday we want to go home again. To return to the land of our souls. I don’t know… maybe that is why it is such a colossal letdown at the end of the Wizard of Oz when Toto pulls down the curtain and behold, there is a crazy old man pulling ropes and talking into a voice modulator. We so wanted to believe we could gain a heart, that we grow a brain and become wiser, or finally gain courage, or just get back to Kansas… And it turns out some snake oil salesman was lying to us the whole time.

Let’s not be snake oil salesmen to ourselves.

On Yom Kippur we are not allowed to play loose with the facts. The truth is not always easy to swallow, but it beats the heck out of living in a world of lies that masquerade as the truth. We have gone down that rabbit hole before, and it’s dangerous.

This world is a real place, and there are verifiable facts out there. We need to be seekers of that truth, about ourselves, about each other, about our nation, about the physical planet.

Our official credo is Shma Yisrael – listen oh Israel. Maybe our words this year should also be: “You know, I could be wrong.” Or: “maybe I should rethink that…” or “you make a good point!” Or, “wait, who just published that fact?”

The word for truth itself spans the entire Hebrew alphabet – Alef, the first letter, mem – dead center – and taf – the last letter – together spell emet.

We are a people of language. We are the people of the book. We are Supreme Court justices, peddlers, bankers, woodchoppers and water drawers, speech writers, physicians and advertisers, scientists and poets. But above all things, let us be truth seekers.

It may be a more difficult task in the coming years than ever before, but this is a quest that should never cease.

And that’s a fact.

Katy Kessler 9/19/18 Katy Kessler 9/19/18

Yom Kippur

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2018/5779

Every year in late October, I wake up extremely early and drive to Armstrong High school to attend the New Hope Prayer Breakfast. Started by the current mayor of New Hope, the breakfast is meant to honor all of the religious backgrounds that are represented in the suburb. Every year I dread this day because I am NOT a morning person (although Fred is working very hard to make me one!), and it is always cold and I don’t particularly like the cold. Yet every year once I enter the auditorium and am embraced by the warmth and kindness of those in attendance, I am reminded of why I attend. I always find inspiration, both from my colleagues and from the students who participate in the morning program. A few years ago, the program honored a particularly inspiring high school graduate.As he approached the podium, I saw a handsome young man in his early 20s who needed some help finding his way to the lectern. Once settled, he began to tell us his story. Elias was driving home from college in North Dakota a few years ago, when, out of nowhere, a car driving at full speed in the wrong direction, struck his car head-on. The next thing Elias knew, he was lying in a hospital bed, barely able to move and unable to see. Elias had been hit by a drunk driver, rendering him blind.

Over the days and weeks and months that followed, the swelling in his body went down, the bones healed, and Elias was even able to attend the court hearing of the drunk driver and find forgiveness. But he never regained his eyesight. So began Elias’s arduous and painstaking task of learning how to navigate the world without the ability to see. He has not given up on any of his dreams, they are just taking a bit longer to reach. Today, he happily lives on his own, in a townhouse in Brooklyn Center. He is finishing his master’s degree in education and he is a student teacher working with middle school band students. He still loves to play music and, if I remember correctly, he has a girlfriend.

At the end of the program I approached Elias and asked if he would be willing to come and speak to our 7th grade students. He agreed without hesitation. When the students entered the room and saw the guest speaker they questioned what he was doing there. When they learned he was going to tell them about how he became blind they were surprised.He did not fit any of their preconceived notions of a blind person! They were in awe of his incredible determination.

Evelyn Glennie is a Grammy-winning percussionist and composer – who, due to a genetic abnormality, was almost completely deaf by the age of 12. Evelyn remembers that year, when her music teacher expressed concern with Evelyn’s ability to play given her disability. The teacher’s logic was understandable: one cannot play music without hearing it. How would Evelyn be able to hear the music she was playing? The teacher did not understand that Evelyn could hear the music with her entire body as she could feel the vibrations from her head to her toes.Evelyn’s resolve forced the teacher to devise a new lesson plan. They soon began each lesson tuning drums. Rather than hear the tone, Evelyn needed to be able to feel in her fingers the very subtle changes in pitch. Her teacher started Evelyn with the kettle drum, the most difficult to tune, understanding that once she mastered this instrument the rest would become easier! During her lessons, Evelyn put her hands on the wall of the music room, and would "listen" to the sounds of the instruments. In this way she connected with those sounds far more broadly than simply depending on the ear. Because of course, the ear is subject to all sorts of other factors: The room one happens to be in, the amplification, the quality of the instrument, the type of sticks – they're all different.

As Evelyn grew older and honed her craft, she decided to audition for the Royal Academy of Music in London. At her audition the admissions committee said they would not accept her because they did “not have a clue about the future of a so-called 'deaf musician.’” She could not accept that and said to them, "Well, if you refuse me for those reasons, as opposed to the ability to perform and to understand and love the art of creating sound – then we have to think very, very hard about the people you do actually accept." And as a result of her challenge to the admissions council, as well as her two outstanding auditions, Evelyn was accepted into the program. Furthermore, this incident impacted music institutions throughout the United Kingdom.A law was passed that made it impossible for an institution to refuse an applicant on the basis of their physical limitations. The admissions committee needed to listen to every single applicant play before deciding to accept or reject them. This led to much more diversity in professional orchestras throughout the world.[1]

Shaquem Griffin is a rookie linebacker, drafted by the Seattle Seahawks in this year’s NFL draft. He is NOT your typical football player. Due to a pre-natal condition, Shaquem’s hand was amputated when he was 4 years old. He nevertheless grew up to star for his high school in track, football, and baseball before winning an athletics scholarship to the University of Central Florida alongside his twin brother. In 2016, Shaquem was named American Athletic Conference defensive player of the year. Shaquem drew national attention at this year’s scouting boot camp when he bench pressed 225 pounds 20 times using a prosthetic hand. He followed that up by recording a 40-yard dash time of 4.38 seconds, the fastest time ever by a linebacker. When asked about his success with only one hand he responds: “People all get tackled the same.” Shaquem has never had much patience for perceived limitations, and has overcome the challenges that could have stood in his way.

Recently, Shaquem was at his nephew’s football game when he saw a young boy on the field who was missing a hand. Shaquem called him over and introduced himself. The boy could not believe he was meeting a real NFL player and that this player was also missing a hand. The boy looked down to hide his tears of gratitude and awe. The one-handed linebacker nudged his little chin upward. “Don’t let anybody tell you what you can’t do,” Shaquem said.

Torah teaches us that we are not to curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind. Elias, Evelyn and Shaquem had significant obstacles in their way. Each of them could have let these obstacles dictate their future. Elias could have decided he was no longer able to become a teacher.Evelyn could have listened to that first music teacher of hers, accepting that since she could not hear with her ears, she could not become a musician. Shaquem – knowing that NEVER before had an athlete without both hands played in the NFL – could have easily given up on his dream. No one would have blamed them for taking a different path. These three people took the commandment from Leviticus one step further.They made sure not to put a stumbling block in front of themselves. They did not allow fear, insecurity, or societal norms to determine their destinies.They looked into their hearts and they found the courage and the determination to follow their own path.

Yom Kippur is the time when each of us is called on to uncover our unique trail, and to evaluate our lives in order to find motivation to move forward. The prayers and the choreography of the service are meant for us to feel the awe of our final days on earth. For example, we rise for Kol Nidre and face the empty ark – as if we are staring into an empty casket – to ask forgiveness for the promises we made, but did not keep. We are to ignore our bodily needs like food and water. We do not look for refuge in alcohol, social media, TV, or music. This is the day when we look squarely at who we are and the stumbling blocks in our way. This is the day we begin to remove those blocks, and Judaism is here to help us with this work.

Judaism is the “satellite navigation system” of the soul, and these High Holy Days are a gift that allows us to stop and see whether we need to change direction.Maimonides, the renowned middle ages philosopher, once said the following regarding the blowing of the shofar:“It is God’s wake-up call to all of us.Without it, we can sleepwalk through life. We waste time on things that are urgent but not important, things that promise happiness but fail to deliver.”

How many of us have experienced this sentiment firsthand? How many of us follow the path directly in front of us, rather than stopping, taking stock, and reevaluating in order to follow our own route? How many of us feel constricted by handicaps that are not visible but we feel intensely? Jewish tradition gives us many examples of people who overcame obstacles, and fought for their goals.

We only need to look to Moses to comprehend how hard this can be. In the Torah, Moses is described as being heavy of tongue. Yes, the greatest orator of our tradition had a speech impediment. He overcame not only this handicap but also his intense shyness to lead the Israelites out of Egypt and speak the beautiful poetry and prose that fill the book of Deuteronomy.

Or we can look to one of the greatest teachers and rabbis of our tradition, Rabbi Akiva, who was born into an extremely poor family and remained illiterate into adulthood. Yet, he had a thirst for knowledge and, with his wife’s encouragement, he finally took the journey to the closest academy to learn Torah at the age of 40. He excelled in his studies. He quickly became a prolific writer and famous teacher with over 12,000 students. We still learn from Rabbi Akiva today, almost two THOUSAND years after his death.

God commands us: Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind. While this sounds like an easy charge it can be the most difficult as it not only applies to our neighbor but also to ourselves. It was not easy for any of the people I’ve described today to overcome their challenges. It took courage, fortitude, and the support of their communities.Yet, each one of them knew they had to pursue their dreams. They could not live lives unfulfilled regardless of the physical and emotional barriers in front of them. In removing these barriers they brought inspiration, knowledge, and great change to themselves and their communities. These changes have improved the world for all of us.In today’s day and age we have the technological innovation to make almost anything possible. It is up to us to find the resolve to remove the physical and emotional obstacles that stand in our way.

Over a year ago, when Thomas Friedman was here for our Voices series, he charged us saying: For the first time in history all of us together can fix all of the problems in our world. I challenge each one of us, in this New Year 5779, to heed his call and pay attention to the commandment of our tradition. May we each work to remove the stumbling blocks in our lives so that we can not only fulfill our greatest potential, but also bring inspiration and transformation to our world.

[1] https://www.ted.com/speakers/evelyn_glennie

Katy Kessler 9/10/18 Katy Kessler 9/10/18

Rosh HaShanah: Hello TIPTY!

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2018/5779

Hello TIPTY!

I missed you guys last year! Thank you for your understanding of my maternity leave. And while I’m speaking to everyone in attendance today, I want you to know that YOU are the inspiration for today’s sermon! I am sorry I am going to have my back to you, but I hope you will still listen!

With the production of Hamilton being in town, I would be remiss if I did not reference it! In the show, Hamilton uses the refrain:

I am not throwing away my shot

I’m just like my country

I’m young, scrappy and hungry

And I’m not throwing away my shot

So many of the most amazing changes in history were started by ambitious, energetic, and brave young people – like you. This includes the establishment of the United States of America. At our nation’s inception, three of our most influential founding fathers were James Monroe at 19 years old, Aaron Burr at 20, and Alexander Hamilton at 21. I understand this may be too “ancient history” for you to feel a connection with these great historical figures. So, let us look more recently. How about to the 1960s when four black teenagers walked up to the all-white Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. and refused to leave – leading to countless sit-ins that swept the South, and forced our country to confront racial injustice.

Or how about the 1970s uprising of black high school students in Johannesburg, South Africa. At this time, the white and black communities spoke different languages. The South African government made a law that only the white language could be spoken, making it nearly impossible for black teachers to teach and for black students to learn. This government mandate was forcing these students into poverty, without any chance of upward mobility. Several of these students courageously responded with a peaceful protest, which turned deadly when police attacked the students with guns and tear gas. The parents of these students could not understand what their children had done.These parents felt that, by standing up and challenging their government, their children were only making life worse for the community. But these inspirational students understood that this new law meant the end of their education and that was untenable for them. Their protest brought international attention and outrage to issues of racial equality, which ultimately led to the dismantling of Apartheid.

Or we can look to this past February when the students of Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL turned their tragedy into action. These students took up the cause of gun control and have not only spoken with President Trump, but have also persuaded companies such as Delta and United Airlines, Hertz and Avis Car Rentals, and Metlife Insurance to cut their ties with the National Rifle Association. These students have done more in a few short months than many lobbying groups, with much deeper pockets, have done in years.

In all ages, society has leaned on its youth to have visions of a better future, while listening to its elders share their dreams about a life once lived. As the prophet Joel so eloquently teaches in the Tanach – “the old shall dream dreams, and the young shall see visions.” During the time that the prophet Joel lived, only select individuals - those who showed their commitment to God by living lives dedicated to helping the vulnerable and taking care of our earth - were given the gift of prophecy. Joel prophesizes that in days to come, in a world where we all work toward justice, at that time, all of our youth will have visions of the future, all will hear and pay attention to God’s voice. While we do not yet live in this more perfect time, we do live in an amazing era where our young adults not only see visions of what needs to be done, but have the courage to act on these visions to help build a future of which we can all be proud.

I want to tell you, the youth who are here today, the ones in the TIPTY choir and the ones in the congregation: the adults in your world are noticing all that you do! While I was working on this very sermon, a friend sent me a text asking if I wanted topic suggestions. Out of curiosity I replied “sure.” He texted: “If I could write the sermon, my topic would be ‘How adults in our country need to be as good as our youth.’” I was delighted to have evidence that I am not the only one who notices all of the work you are doing and change you are making. While we debate and discuss, you are out there getting things done. You are changing the world. Do you, the youth of our congregation, our world, truly understand the power that you have? The difference that you can make? I still hear too many of you question the kind of impact you could have; I see you shrug your shoulders in defeat. The reality is that you are the ones who inspire the rest of us to act.

In 2015 I traveled with a group of 8th grade students to Alabama and Georgia to explore the intersection of the Civil Rights movement and Judaism. The movie Selma had just come out and it was the 50th anniversary of the march which happened because of the work of two brave young people – James Bevel and Diane Nash. James and Diane understood that segregation was eating at the soul, not only of their community, but of the nation. Our group thought of their courage as we walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with images of the beatings in our head. When we entered the town of Selma we were met by a middle-aged and very energetic woman named Joanne. She pulled us all together with her strong yet sweet voice and began to tell us her story.She spoke of the rush of excitement in early spring of 1965, as she walked across the bridge surrounded by her community, holding hands with her family. And then the sheer terror she felt as the police descended on the march. She remembers being beaten to the ground and out of nowhere being picked up and put into a car and taken to safety. The events of that day defined her and her drive to bring equality to her community. She challenged the students on the trip to find their passion and not let anything get in their way.

Joanne did not know it at the time, but standing in the front of the line, next to Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. The two became fast friends in the early 1960s. Both were speakers at a conference on religion and race organized by the National Conference of Christians and Jews[1]. They supported one another through many endeavors including the march from Selma to Montgomery. After the march, Rabbi Heschel was asked if he had time to pray on the journey. He responded, “I felt my legs were praying.” His marching, his protesting, his speaking out for Civil Rights was his greatest prayer of all. He, as well as Joanne from Selma, did not let anything interfere with their vision, or actions towards, a more accepting, more equal, and more just society.

You, the students of Temple Israel, the students of Minneapolis, have as much courage, passion, and fortitude as all of the students I have been talking about; these characteristics are ingrained in you, and I marvel at this all the time. In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting earlier this year, you coordinated walkouts at your schools in conjunction with your peers in Florida. Through the organization Students Demand Action, you planned and implemented a march that brought thousands to our state capital.

Your civic involvement is unprecedented in many ways.This is why I was not surprised to learn that youth, ages 18 to 24, decided the 2008 election. Just by showing up to vote in greater numbers than previous decades, you changed the course of history and elected the first black president of the United States. In fact, according to the Youth Electoral Significance Index, voters between 18-29 years old will have the greatest impact of any age group on our Minnesota elections. The races here are projected to be very close and in close races, even slight boosts in youth voting could mean the difference between defeat and victory for candidates from either party. It is our responsibility as part of the Jewish community to play an active role in choosing our leaders. The Talmud teaches that "A ruler is not to be appointed unless the community is first consulted."[2] Judaism views voting as a responsibility and as US citizens, it is our privilege and an opportunity for each of us to express our beliefs on what is best for our country.

Not only do we, your parents, teachers, and clergy, listen to you and find inspiration in your words and your actions, we are also here to help you develop your skills of advocacy.Many of these skills are already built into what you do at school[3]. Problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, and perseverance are all a part of your daily experience. This morning, I have given you historical and modern-day examples of youth and young adults who are using these skills to change history. My hope is that you will see yourselves in these stories, see that the current movements you are already a part of are connected to those you learn about in history class. Your work for justice also connects you to our Jewish tradition. If you have not yet reached confirmation, 10th grade, then you will soon learn more about this link. During Confirmation class, Temple Israel students connect their Jewish learning to activism and spend the year studying Jewish texts - Torah, Tanach, Talmud. In these studies I work to show you how ancient texts are directly connected to current events. Together, we use these texts to lobby on Capitol Hill! Jewish tradition supports you when you choose to protest or organize or speak truth to power.

You, the youth of today, are a part of a community of young people with a shared vision of a more equitable society that stretches back to Alexander Hamilton and even farther – to Moses, to King David, and to Rabbi Hillel who is so often quoted as saying:

If I am not for myself who will be for me?

If I am only for myself who am I?

If not now, when?

If not now, if not when you are young and energetic, when you are idealistic and committed, then when will you, or any of us, have the determination to do this most important work? You, the youth of today, have the knowledge, the passion, and the resources to change our world. I want to be sure, before we leave this morning, that you know, unequivocally, that you have this power, this strength, this courage and that we, your teachers, your parents, your trusted adults are here to support you in your passions and, mostly, to stay out of your way as you work to bring justice to this world.I strongly believe, knowing you as I do, that you are NOT going to throw away your shot!

[1]https://www.plough.com/en/topics/community/leadership/two-friends-two-prophets

[2]Babylonian Talmud Berachot 55a

[3]https://www.ted.com/talks/sydney_chaffee_social_justice_belongs_in_our_schools/transcript?rss#t-593794

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Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
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