Sermons

Erev Rosh HaShanah, 2020/5781 Katy Kessler Erev Rosh HaShanah, 2020/5781 Katy Kessler

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.

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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

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Erev Rosh HaShanah: Traditional Service

Sermon by Rabbi 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.

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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.

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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 momentFor 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.

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Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2018/5779

Rosh HaShanah is the celebration of the creation of the world. The rabbis in the Talmud tell us that when we as humans create something, we actually create the same thing. If we create coins in a mint, the coins all look the same. But God is different. God creates human beings from one source and none of us look exactly the same.


Judaism teaches us that in God’s unity, we see it in the diversity of the human spirit, in the diversity of the world. That’s why in Kindergarten we here at Temple Israel have each of our Kindergartners create their own skin color. We have paints; we have black and we have white and brown and yellow and green and pink and beige. And each of the Kindergartners have to create their very own skin color. Everybody has multiple colors in their skin. Some of us have more pink, some of us have more brown, and some of us have more black. And it’s to teach our Kindergartners the very lesson that the Talmud teaches us: We are each unique beings and our skin color is the beautiful creation that God gave us. And then when they find the very palette of their skin in the mixture of the colors of the paint, on a huge mural, each one draws their face. 


Over the years the mural has changed. We have many more children with brown and black and it is beautiful and it is wonderful and it is the changing nature of our Jewish community. 


Jews of color who grew up here have told me many interesting stories. They tell me that when they leave the cocoon of this community that they experience things – and even in this community the stories are powerful. You see, through adoption and conversion and intermarriage, the palette of our faces and of our skin is changing. 


Jews of color have told me that sometimes they don’t feel Jewish. A Korean-born adoptee by white, Ashkenazi parents went to Hillel her first year of college and was questioned: “Why are you here?” She had her Bat Mitzvah here. She grew up here. “What are you doing here?” 


A young woman with a Latino father said that she felt like she had to leave her Latino identity at the front door as she came into Temple Israel because no one ever asked her about her heritage as a Latino. 


We have many more stories like that. 


A family who have children from Guatemala – after a history lesson here at Temple Israel, an ancestry lesson, came up to me and showed me the map. Asia, Africa – they were not there. There was an assumption that one’s ancestry came from Eastern or Western Europe. And South America was cut in half. Part of it wasn’t even on the sheet. 


We at Temple Israel and in the Jewish community – we need to discuss race and we need to discuss it from the inside out. Our Board of Directors has made this one of our main principles out of our strategic plan and I feel proud that we are doing it. 


But let’s take a moment and figure out how we got here. How did we get to the point where when we think of the person, a Jew, we think of somebody from Eastern or Western Europe? How did that all happen?


Well, in the 1800s there were about 2.5 million Jews in the world. We grew fast. By 1900 we had about 9.5 million Jew and by 1939 we had 16.6 million Jews in the world. And 9.5 came from Europe, 6.5 came from North and South America, and 1 million from Asia. We understand 1939, the Holocaust, and 6 million European Jews were killed, slaughtered. And what has happened is that we, in this United States, the majority of us came from Western or Eastern Europe; there were migrations from those places, so we have become the majority.


In 1960, the census in the United States Jews for the first time were able to check off Caucasian. All of a sudden the idea of our race became white. For white, Ashkenazi, European Jews.


What has happened since then, is that now in Israel there are 70 countries represented by the Jews who live there and this country is changing as well – 75% of the Jewish community lives in the United States or in Israel, North America probably -- I’ll add Canada. And so, we now must wrestle with race in our community.


But let’s go very far back. Where do we come from? We come from Asia and Africa. I’m pretty sure that Sarah and Abraham, I’m pretty sure that Moses and Miriam and Aaron were brown people, not white. We know that Zipporah, Moses’s wife, was Ethiopian. We know that Joseph’s wife was Egyptian. And so our people were very much an integrated whole. We came from various places with different shades of reality, but we always had one thing in common – we had the similar rights, rituals, and symbols that bound us, connected us, beyond the different realities in which we lived. 


Asian and African and Latin American Jews – they have different experiences, they have different foods, they have different understandings and narratives that we’ve never actually listened for. But in this day and age when we’re so worried about Jewish survival, it is the very door that will open the possibility of growth. A growth of population, a growth of narrative, a growth of food. 

Now let’s be honest, we all want to be Sephardic around Passover, don’t we? Have you ever heard of mushroom, jalapeño matzo balls? Mexican. Have you ever tasted not dill or garlic powder, but turmeric and cinnamon? And the beauty of cumin – Jewish Moroccan dishes are full of the smells that we love. 


In India, the haroset is actually dates, very much like the Sephardic tradition, but actually they are cooked and then put through a cheese-cloth so it’s a syrup, not a paste. So much easier to spread on matzo! Where have we been? 


We have a lot to learn. We have a lot of places to grow. And I believe it is in our hands. 


The Talmud teaches us of an emperor who questions a rabbi by holding a dove in his hand. He is trying to trick that rabbi and he says, “Rabbi, is the dove alive or is it dead?” The rabbi knows exactly what will happen. If he says alive, then that emperor will crush the bird with his bare hands. If he says dead, the emperor will let it go. So instead he says, “Dear Emperor, the answer is in your hands.” 


The answer is in our hands. We just need the courage to do the work.


Robin DiAngelo, PhD., speaks about white fragility. And she teaches us many lessons. It is a powerful book. It is a life-changing book. And she shares many things, but I want to share two of them. She says there is no colorblindness in this world. We all have grown up with the messages about what it means to have dark skin. None of us – none of us – are immune. And when we say we are colorblind or race doesn’t matter, what we do is we shut down conversation. And she says that people with white skin privilege often cannot even put a sentence together when they’re talking about race because we haven’t flexed that muscle enough to talk about it, to hear about it. And when we don’t allow ourselves those kinds of very uncomfortable situations, but necessary; we leave race up for the radio and tv waves out there – that allows and brings people to call police on two black men who were waiting at Starbucks for a business meeting to begin. That didn’t only happen at Starbucks in Philadelphia. That’s happened in coffee shops right in our neighborhood, let me tell you. Hurtful, hurtful realities. 


If we don’t talk about race, then what happens? Somebody calls a police officer on a Yale student having fallen asleep in a common area. If we don’t talk about race, then Colin Kaepernick’s Nike advertisement – I think I have heard more conversations about why he shouldn’t have been part of the advertisement that what he is trying to teach us. We have stopped talking about race. We have not gotten ourselves to talk about what he wants us to talk about. Forget about Nike, let’s talk about race and racism in this country. And that is what he wants from us as well. But instead we get distracted by who should be on the billboard for a pair of tennis shoes. 


It is in our hands. It is in our hands and we can do the work.


Robin DiAngelo tells us that she doesn’t care how she gets confronted about her own racism, she doesn’t ask somebody to be nicer or quieter or less emotional as we all have done. She just wants to hear the feedback because that’s how she’s going to grow. 


I want to hear the feedback of my implicit bias. I want to be confronted about my own racism. I want to become better. And this congregation, at its heart, has always grown and expanded with the issues of the time. And this one we will do together as well.


So what do we do?


This past summer I had a brunch at my house with congregants of color and the conversation was enlightening. And it was amazing and it was profound. We are going to get this group of people, many of whom are not Jewish but raising their beautiful children of all colors in our congregation. We must do the work for those children. They are our children. And so this group will get back together we will continue. And just watch out for many wonderful things. We talked about having a festival with Moroccan food and Indian Jewish food and Chinese Jewish food. I called it anything but Ashkenazi, but I don’t know if that’s so cool. You’re not laughing – I thought it was funny. We’re not going to have matzo balls unless they’re jalapeño and mushroom.


We also have made a commitment here at Temple to do implicit bias work and training. We are going as a staff and clergy and security and administration. We are all going to wrestle with race in order to change the world from the inside out.


The Jews of color of this community and this congregation demand that we go out into the world and change it as well. And so, this year 5770 in Hebrew spells out “taf shin ayin tet.” What that means is get moving. Get moving. And we’re going to get moving because guess what? As Nike says, just do it.

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Erev Rosh HaShanah, 2018/5779 Katy Kessler Erev Rosh HaShanah, 2018/5779 Katy Kessler

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Where Was Grandpa?

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2018/5779

This summer Barb and I became grandparents for the second time, as Benjamin and Melissa welcomed Alan Glaser into the world. Alan! I have not yet met him, but I understand he is a fine young man and is already seeking gainful employment.

It appears that Alan may have inherited his Baba’s red hair and his Grandpa Sim’s stomach issues. His two-and-a-half-year-old sister Margaret is coming to terms with no longer being the center of the known universe. Something most of us are supposed to grapple with before we are five, and yet many of us believe ourselves to be the center of the universe our whole lives.

Grandchildren are a big deal in Judaism. They are said to be the very embodiment of the word Naches. The ultimate blessings. They are the proof there is such thing as a free lunch – you play with them, bring them stuff, and then go home and let their parents deal with the mess. Though I am a man of the cloth, I don’t really do diapers.

Psalm 128 says: “May you live to see your children’s children,” from which comes the beautiful teaching that to gaze into the eyes of one’s grandchild is to see eternity. There are some Jews who refer to their first grandchild as “my Kaddish,” meaning: This child will guarantee my immortality by way of memory. But someone does have to make sure they know the Kaddish…
We have been doing FaceTime with our granddaughter Margaret for a while now. Barb usually initiates the connection, so I hear from the next room the lovely chirping of my granddaughter saying, “Where’s Grandpa Sim?”

I quickly insert myself into the picture frame. “Right here!” I cry. I’m charmed by her request, but on some darker days, when I am thinking about the future of our world and, God willing, the longevity of my grand-pups, this question, “Where’s Grandpa Sim,” takes on greater meaning. Where, indeed, is Grandpa Sim?

Who doesn’t want to be present in the lives of our children and our children’s children? We want to show them the deepest love, and comfort them in the warm blanket of our affection. And we want to share with them the joys and significance of our religious traditions. And most of this comes naturally to us.

But I wonder, as the years continue, if Margaret’s poignant question might become: “Where were you, Grandpa?” Or: “Tell me the story about what you did when you heard about the world warming up?” Or: “How big was your carbon footprint, Grandpa?” Or: “Is it true you lived during a time when there was still a fighting chance to reverse climate change, Grandpa?”

As they grow older and wiser, my grandkids might ask me if I was one of the people who didn’t believe the scientists. Or upon becoming aware of their inherited Jewish lineage: “Doesn’t the Torah teach us right from the beginning that we are responsible for the health of the planet?” And I don’t think it is going to mean a darn thing to our grandchildren if we respond with: “Well, honey, it was all very political…”

We often hear about the consequences of a warming planet in long term figures. “Statistics reveal Miami will be under water by the end of the century!” blares one recent headline. Why do we project the consequences of our actions to 80 years from now? Are we trying to soothe ourselves, as though we need not feel overly burdened by something that will reach its peak until long after we, ourselves, have departed this world?

I think if we learned anything this last year it is that we don’t have it all figured out. I also think we learned that it is hard to be human, and it is especially difficult – and even problematic to believe – that we can solve the world’s problems solely by using our mammoth brains and technological advances. Or that we can leave it to our elected officials locally and nationally to bail us out.

Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world, brings many messages. The call of the shofar awakens us to gaze mindfully and honestly at ourselves and our relation to the world we affect with every breath.

These holidays teach about both human power and humility. As the tradition goes, each of us should carry with us in one pocket the sacred name of God, acknowledging that we were created in the Divine Image. And in the other pocket, we should carry dust and ashes to remind ourselves that we are mortal, physical beings interacting with a physical world. We tend to forget both things.

A story goes that a man was once complaining to God, saying: “You have no idea how hard it is to be human — to live a life darkened by suffering and despair in a world filled with violence and destruction, to fear death and worry that nothing we do, or create, or dream, seems to matter. You have no idea how hard it is to be human!”

God responded, “Wait, you think it’s easy being God? I have a whole universe to run, galaxies upon galaxies demanding constant vigilance. You think you could do that?”

“I’ll tell you what,” suggested the Man, “let’s switch places, for just a moment. For just a little bit You be human, and I’ll be God, and that way we can determine who has it harder.”

“For just a moment?” God considered, “OK, why not.” So the man and God switched places. The man sat upon God’s throne and God descended to the earth. After that one moment had passed, God looked up and said, “OK, time to switch back.” But the man refused. He refused to give up the throne of God.

And, as the story maintains, we still haven’t given the throne back to God. We still think it is easier and more beneficial for us to maintain control as supreme beings, rather than to re-establish God’s place on the throne. Why is that important? Because when we know our place, we can shudder at the hugeness and fragility of the earth. When we know our place we can feel awe and wonder at stuff we might otherwise just take for granted.

In the old days there were storms, and fires, diseases, drought, crops would die, people would get sick, cities would be destroyed in wars and the population devastated. Ah, but today we have category 5 storms and 600 square mile fires, diseases, drought, sickness, war, and devastated populations.

The difference is that back in the day we used to attribute these horrible events to God’s being angry with us. All those disasters were because of God’s divine wrath. But now, because we are smarter, more scientific, more sophisticated, we don’t look to God’s will to explain our fate. We look out upon a reality shaped by politics and economics, a reality shaped by our own choices.

Human beings can achieve amazing feats, but we are not gods.

Maybe the idea of God controlling every detail of the universe was helpful because it meant that God actually gave a hoot about us.

I am reminded of a story about my son Benjamin, the father of our new grandson. Way back in the difficult days of his junior high school days, Benjamin, who has Tourette’s, had been getting no small amount of teasing at school for his verbal and physical tics. One evening Barb heard Ben up in his room sobbing and saying: “Why did God do this to me?” It broke her heart to hear this, and she mentioned it to his therapist at the time. The doctor calmly shrugged and said, “It isn’t so bad. Obviously your Benjamin thinks well enough of himself that God is taking the time to deal with him personally.”

And that’s kind of how it is with us when we sing the Avinu Malkeinu. The jury may still be out on whether or not anybody is listening. But see how we care enough about ourselves that we want to believe we really are in relationship with a God who cares!

The midrash tells a story of Adam and Eve’s very first day on earth. The story begins with a sunset. The very first sunset. As Adam and Eve watch their only source of light disappear, they panic. They beg and pray for the sun to return. In fear and anger they order the sun to stop its descent. Then, as darkness falls, they mourn the loss of their light. But it is only when they finally let go and trust in the natural cycles of the earth and the ability of the world to heal itself that they are able to fall asleep. When they awaken, there it is! The sun, in all its glory!

There are other versions of that story that add that the first human beings learn to make fire, a light of their own devising, and that is what comforts them. Their ability to take control. How delicate is that balance between trust and control…

On this holiday, in these complex modern times, we need to acknowledge both truths. That we are blessed with immense ability to alter nature, and that the world knows how to heal itself. That we may wield the physical power of gods, but need to humble ourselves before the Creator.

When you look into your grandchild’s eyes, Jewish tradition tells us, you see eternity. You realize that every energy decision you make daily, every official you vote into office, every movement you join or avoid, every religious imperative to be stewards of a fragile planet you either dismiss or take to be morally binding, is clearly more than about just you. It is about a future that will contain people we love dearly.

If we are not adequately attentive to this monumental challenge, those innocent questions of a grandchild might very well become: “Where were you, grandpa and grandma? What did you do? Is it true you could have made a difference?”

Let us celebrate this New Year with pledges and goals that go beyond improving only ourselves to seeking a refuah, a healing on a global and a multi-generational level. We are at an immensely important moment in human history… in the eye of the storm, so to speak. We are this amazing mixture of mortal and Divine. And it is time for us to use human physical strength to achieve a Divine future that will allow us to look into our grandchildren’s eyes and say: “I was there, and I did everything I could for you.”

Keyn y’hi ratzon…

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Erev Rosh HaShanah, 2016/5777 Katy Kessler Erev Rosh HaShanah, 2016/5777 Katy Kessler

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Laughing and Dreaming

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2016/5777

Passover Seders were always a big deal at our home when I was growing up. My father would lead the Seder and my mom would make sure that the table was set just right and that all the appropriate Pesach food out at just the right time. Mom loved the holiday rituals and traditions and really, all things Jewish. You know, traditions… like someone would spill the wine, or that that the chicken should always be a little on the dry side. Traditions!


Two family traditions that especially linger for me are that my mom loved to laugh, and was my best audience. Also, during the Seder my mom had a special fondness for a certain song in the Haggadah, Laugh at all my dreams…. Originally Sachki Sachki, by a Russian poet.


The song’s words are a statement of belief in the goodness of people, a salute to the inherent decency of humankind; that despite everything you’ve heard, every hurt you’ve suffered, every time you’ve been let down, you can still trust in people to be kind and caring, to achieve peace, to bring laughter to sorrowing hearts… to repair broken worlds, one at a time.


Even as a young boy sitting at our Seders I thought it was pretty amazing that my mother, who had witnessed Kristalnacht, had left Germany at the age of 10 without her parents, journeyed halfway around the world, was adopted by a foster couple in San Francisco, later learning that her parents had been imprisoned in a work camp and then sent to their deaths at Auschwitz, could joyfully sing a song that testified to the goodness of people. Laugh at all my dreams my dearest, went the song, laugh and I repeat anew, that I still believe in people as I still believe in you.


Mom was a dreamer and she knew how to laugh and deep down I think she believed in people. She celebrated people. But in typical Jewish fashion, she wrestled with it. She knew that human beings often need their behavior to be adjusted. That we need to know how to adapt to change, but that it is within the human spirit to accomplish that.


The familiar Psalm says: b’shuv  Adonai et Tzion, hayyinu k’cholmim: “When God brought back the exiles to Zion, we were like dreamers.” Despite all we have been through, or what may lie ahead, it is the most Jewish of ways to all at once dream, and to wrestle with the reality that requires dreaming. Somehow our Jewish heroes seem to be able to do that balancing act.


Three well-known Jews who truly could not be more different than each other passed away this year. Elie Wiesel, Shimon Peres and Gene Wilder. Yes, Gene Wilder. The entertainer in me needs to include Gene Wilder.


Each, in his own way, was a dreamer. Each believed in and celebrated people, each enjoyed laughter, each one lived a bold Jewish life in the face of odds stacked against him. And each one knew the great things human beings are capable of… with a little Jewish nudging, and a lot of dreaming.


As a child Elie Wiesel would sing along with his Jewish classmates Ani ma’amin b’emunah shlemah - I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah. That “perfect faith” was to be challenged in the most profound way when as a young boy Elie endured during the horrors of Auschwitz. His famous memoir Night became an international bestseller and brought the reality of the Holocaust to the world. As an adult Wiesel became the author and spokesman for a generation of victims and survivors.


Wiesel never let up, demanding that people live up to being human, and rise from the ashes of the Shoah. He taught that the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it is indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it is indifference. And the opposite of life, is not death, it is indifference....


In other words, Elie Wiesel taught us that the worst thing a human being can do is to not care! That within each and every one of us there is that caring spirit that must be expressed in order to be fully human. Elie Wiesel believed that humanity could redeem itself.


But Wiesel wrestled with the reality of the Jew in a real world. Asked many times: How could anyone believe in God after the Holocaust, Wiesel would respond: “That isn’t the question. Better you should ask: How can we believe in humankind?” He rejected both the notion that God had anything to do with the horrific events but insisted that human beings have the capacity to choose good over evil, and need to be reminded frequently! Living in a world of people, he knew that humankind is our only hope.


Shimon Peres who died only this last week, was known worldwide for his tenacity of spirit and as a dreamer of peace. Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas was present at his funeral only two days ago. President Bill Clinton once praised Shimon Peres saying: Here is a man who thought big bold thoughts and figured out actual ways to achieve them.


You’d have to go a long way to find a leader in the Middle East who went to the lengths Shimon Peres did to achieve peace. He used to say: As a bird cannot fly with one wing, as a person cannot applaud with one hand, so a country cannot make peace just with one side, with itself. For peace, we need the two of us.


Peres, believed in the possibility that Israelis and the Palestinian people could live side by side in harmony. It didn’t always make him popular, and he never became as beloved a leader as he might have wanted to be. We will read many articles about Peres in the weeks to come, and many of them will testify to the fact that even as he worked for peace, Peres was also the architect of Israel’s most powerful defense systems, and he was demanding of those who would enter into peace negotiations with Israel.


Shimon Peres never stopped dreaming about the human capacity to achieve peace. When asked: “What was the greatest achievement of his career?” Peres responded with this. He said: “There once was a great painter named Mordecai Ardon, who was asked which picture was the most beautiful he had ever painted. Ardon replied, ‘Ah, that is the picture I will paint tomorrow.’ That is also my answer,” Peres said. “My next achievement.” So it goes with dreamers. The greatest achievement is the one that is yet to come.


But when push came to shove, Shimon Peres lived to dwell in a world of people and he knew that humankind is our only hope.


It may seem strange to include the comedic actor Gene Wilder, but like something out of News of the Weird Wilder’s death 2 months after Elie Wiesel passed, Wilder, in characteristic fashion, almost stole the show! Why would Jewish people be so moved by the passing of this crazy actor from the Mel Brooks movies and countless other zany flicks?


Describing himself as a Jewish Buddhist Atheist, Gene Wilder summed up his religious views with Hillel’s admonition that what is hateful to you do not do to another. Gene Wilder knew that the way into the human heart is through laughter and he kept everyone, young and old, laughing throughout his career. He experienced many sad episodes in his life, losing his loved ones, and eventually succumbing to dementia. But somehow he seemed to retain his sense of humor and his love of humanity.


Whether or not Wilder identified strongly with Judaism, his characters were distinctively human… and Jewish! The neurotic worried Leopold Bloom in The Producers; a proud Rabbi carrying a Torah scroll through the old west in The Frisco Kid. Bringing sweetness and song to little children in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, or in Young Frankenstein, when he corrects the pronunciation of his name – “that’s Frahn-ken –shteen!”  Very Jewish.


But what is equally telling about the actor was in the last three years of his battle with Alzheimers he opted not to go public with his dementia. It wasn’t out of vanity, nor was he shirking the responsibility of bringing light to the disease. Rather, Gene Wilder’s relatives told the press that he was thinking of the countless young children that might see him out on the street, or in a park or restaurant, and might smile or call out to him ‘there’s Willy Wonka,’ – only to be told by an adult that he was ill. Wilder said he “simply couldn’t bear the idea of one less child smiling in the world.” Living in a world of people he knew that humankind is our only hope.


My mother used to come to Temple here and tell the story of her childhood and her journey half way around the world and the kids were riveted. When I took over the job, telling my mom’s story in the second person, the kids listened, but not quite as well. Part of the difference was that she was telling it about herself, about a child their very age when it all happened. And the kids thought that was pretty cool.


But the real power in the way my mother told her story was in how positive she was about the whole thing. It wasn’t a sad history lesson. It was about the childhood friend who stuck by her in dark times. It was about honoring the resilience of her parents when confronted by the Nazis. It was about her colorful grandfather who got along with every person in their little farming village. It was about her own insistence on observing a strictly kosher lifestyle in her new foster home. Going on to marry a young rabbinical student. Raising four Jewish children. Every element of her story was imbued with hope, laughter, strength and a vision for a higher form of humanity.


When kids would write her thank you letters they rarely expressed sorrow for her losses. Rather, they were amazed, amused and inspired by her upbeat let’s-get-on-with-it attitude. They liked her laughter, they were impressed with her memories of happiness, even in a dark time.

We are human. We live in a human world. We embark tonight on a new Jewish human year. This is our destiny, and hope and belief in humankind is and will always be our best hope. Being Jewish will always be a balancing act between the difficulties of a real world that is not always kind, and the firm belief that human beings are capable of great, great things.


Laugh at all my dreams my dearest, laugh and I repeat anew. For I still believe in people, as I still believe in you!


Join me as we sing the song together.

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Erev Rosh HaShanah, 2013/5774 Katy Kessler Erev Rosh HaShanah, 2013/5774 Katy Kessler

Erev Rosh HaShanah: A Rabbi With No Voice

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2013/5774

About three weeks ago I lost my ability to talk. The first tickles of discomfort began on a Wednesday and by Friday my voice was completely gone. It was less than three weeks before Rosh Hashanah. I needed my voice for the High Holidays. I made an emergency appointment with an ENT. I went in and they had me try to speak and make lots of funny sounds. They did a scope of my vocal cords and had me make more silly sounds. Finally they came to a conclusion. My vocal cords were red and inflamed, most likely the side effect of a cold. There was no infection, no real irregularity. So, what could I do, I asked? How could I fix this? Drink lots of liquids, get plenty of rest, gargle with salt water, try not to cough, and speak as little as possible. Umm, WHAT??? Hello, do you know what I do? I am a rabbi, I speak for a living. I have services tonight and tomorrow. “Not possible” they said. You are going to need to find someone to cover for you. They did not put me on complete vocal rest, but directed me to “say only what is important”.

Say only the words that are important. What an interesting concept to think about. Research says that children in professional homes hear 2,100 words an hour. An hour! That is a lot of talking. No wonder Judaism tells us many times and in many different ways that we need to be careful with what we say. We know that Judaism speaks against lashon hara, having an evil tongue. The Psalms teach us to guard our tongue from evil and our lips from speaking lies. Many Torah portions speak about oaths. We are told, in detail, how to make oaths in order to guarantee it is fulfilled. The Torah teaches that: “An oath must be phrased so as to indicate that swearing is intended; there is no punishment unless a Name or attribute of G-d is mentioned. It must be expressed orally and the speaker's intent must agree with what is said”. We are also forbidden to swear falsely or in vain. What you say, and the way in which you say it, is extremely important.

Of course! There is nothing new here. We have heard professionals tell us that when fighting one should never be accusatory, but instead use “I feel....” We have all been reprimanded for gossiping or idle chatter. And how many times were you told as a child: if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all? We know these lessons and can repeat them back, but as with all lessons it is never completely clear how deep they make it into our psyche. I knew all of these things, but still the idea of saying only what was important was new to me. What do I say? What do I avoid saying? Most importantly when are the times during the day when I really need to speak? I knew I had to avoid speaking at all other times.

It turns out that not only do I spend much of the day talking, I also enjoy speaking. I like hearing what people have to say and contributing to the conversation. I like asking questions in order to uncover other’s stories. I enjoy sharing my experiences. Yet, and this is difficult for a Rabbi to admit, not all of my words are spoken in the context of an enriching personal interaction. I also talk when I am bored, contribute when there is really nothing to add, make sarcastic comments and tell stories about others that are not mine to tell. From my experience I learned that email and texting is not the same as talking to someone. No matter how many emoticons you use, tone of voice does not come through in text, yet in many contexts we have come to treat these exchanges the same way as a voice conversation. We have trained ourselves to think that it is the same thing. In emails we express and explain the emotions that are behind our words. We know that the reader is guessing our expression and our mood, so we are not shy about being explicit.

In text on the other hand, maybe because it is on our phones, we think that the other person will understand our tone of voice, our intention. I do not usually have entire conversations over text. Mostly I use texting for logistics or checking in - what time are we meeting at the restaurant, are you getting snacks for the students, did everything go smoothly at the event? If a conversation needs to take place, then I pick up the phone. During the time that I could not speak almost all of my conversations were over text. Let me tell you, I got into trouble. I had more misunderstandings with people I care about and who know me well, then I had ever had before. It was such a relief when I was finally able to make phone calls!

But it is not just that texting can lead to miscommunication, it is also that hearing another's voice is intimate. I never thought about it before, but our voices are a part of who we are. It is a part of what defines us in the hearts and minds of others. I had not thought about missing the sound of one’s voice. It is not just the words that we say that are important, the voice that says them is also important, the tones and the expressions, the deep masculinity or the high pitched soprano voice. All of these things are part of what bind us to others. When I could speak again, those close to me told me how much they had missed hearing my voice.

I learned that much of what I say is unnecessary. My words are not always productive, helpful, or kind. Curt comments, complaints, biting remarks and jokes were all the first things that I stopped saying. They are not only unimportant; they are futile and sometimes painful. My days of restricted speech made me think much about my grandfather. He is a man of few words, but when he speaks, everyone listens. We know his words are meaningful and worth listening to. When my family gathers together, thirty or more of us, you can barely get a word in edgewise. However, when my grandfather begins to motion that he wants to contribute to the conversation, people start yelling, “shhh Grandpa is going to talk”. It is probably the only thing that can get all of us to settle down.

What if all of our words were so important to hear? What if all of us were able to avoid saying what is hurtful or sarcastic, what we know will have the proverbial effect of punching another in the stomach. One author writes a painful, but true statement about our use of words. “There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy us. Another sentence exists, another series of words that could heal us. If we are lucky we will get the second, but we can be certain of getting the first”[1]. The hardest part about this is that too often, the people who destroy us with words are the ones who we are closest to, the ones who know us the best and are supposed to love us. Sometimes when we speak we are not trying to enhance or enrich someone’s life, nor are we trying to resolve an argument or dispute, all we are trying to do is hurt the other person. These are the words that would be best left unsaid. Words are powerful. They help us to connect with people. They convey our state of mind and help us to uncover what others are thinking and feeling. They show our humanity and help us to recognize that in others. When we have a pleasant interaction with the barista at the coffee shop, when we say thank you to the cashier at the store, when we ask how another’s day is going we show that we care about them and that we are aware of the thoughts and feelings of others. Even when we use our words to have difficult or uncomfortable conversations, or when we use them to fight for something in which we believe, we are using them for good, to bring change to our world and better our society. We are using them to improve and strengthen our relationship. We are using them with positive intentions and heartfelt conviction.

I am a rabbi, I speak and use words for a living, and this experience has made me reevaluate how I use them. I had to do this for almost two weeks. I had to consider the benefit of my words versus the cost to my health before I spoke. I needed to weigh the relevance of any comment I was going to make to determine if it would be productive, helpful, useful. Would my speaking add to the conversation? Would it give new meaning or insight? Would it help solve a problem? Would it brighten someone’s day? Would it bring healing? If the answer was no to these questions then I would remain silent. After all, I could only say what I considered to be truly meaningful.

I hope that I will be able to carry these lessons into the New Year. I pray that I will choose my words wisely and continue to say only what will positively impact another’s life. May we all come to understand that “Words... are innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if we look after them we can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they are used improperly they are powerful enough to start wars. Words deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can bring change to people and the world.”[2] May we remember this as we head into the New Year.

[1] Philip K. Dick, VALIS 

[2] Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing: A Play

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Erev Rosh HaShanah, 2012/5773 Katy Kessler Erev Rosh HaShanah, 2012/5773 Katy Kessler

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2012/5773

Happy New Year to all of you who have come here this past week. I’m sure for you, as I know for myself, that being together is essential and important as we watch the world feeling as if it seems to be spinning out of control.

Last year I talked about change as an individual transition and this year I’m going to talk about world change: change that is not incremental any longer but exponential. It happens every day and every minute, and I believe that religion is the battlefield in which this change is emerging.

You see last week, as many of us who know the US ambassador to Morocco from our very own town, Sam and Sylvia Kaplan faced the death of Chris Stevens, the Ambassador to Libya. This brought a heavy heart, and our prayers and our hearts go out to his family and to the three other foreign diplomats who gave their lives.

And then the riots in Egypt, seemingly a response to the movie that went viral, “Innocence of Muslims.” Rabbi Glaser and I watched it for just a short time. It is a horrible movie, horrible. (The Muslims shouldn’t be rioting: the Actors’ Guild should be.) This is a movie in its very content that I do not believe was the cause of the riots. I think that is simplistic, and actually is a place that many people go. I thank God every day I was born in this country, and that I have first amendment rights. I appreciate it, I bank on it.

But the fact that we have a cultural divide and a difference in our basic rights: that is not new to the world; we all know it. What’s new is that it went viral, what’s new is that people had access to it, that it is the world that is changing, that it is out there. There are mega-changes. We are in a major transition in our world and that is what the response is: it’s happening in Egypt, it’s happening in Tunisia, it’s happening in Libya. It’s a reaction to a world and a transformation that is bigger than any one of us, any country. It is a world change; we know it. We began long ago as a movement in the Enlightenment movement in what is called the Industrial Time, the industrialization. We are at the end of it, if not onto a whole other post-modern, post-industrial world. We don’t quite know what it is but I can tell you when these major transformations happen, let me show you and tell you two obvious ways of knowing.

The generation gap becomes wider. Now let’s just talk for a moment about the generation gap. We have the great Generation. Those of us who are Baby Boomers need to ask our ten year olds to help us with our electronics: that is a generation gap. It is truly the case that the lives of our children and our grandchildren are vastly different than our lives. They’ve grown up in a culture and a sea of the ability to be on time all the time, connected world-wide, whenever they choose.

The second barometer of the transition that is immense is that people become entrenched in their ideas. There’s a new book out: it’s called The Big Sort, and basically what it says is that we live and we pray and we eat with people just like us, and that that has been a move that has happened where neighborhoods are monolithic in their political beliefs, in their values and how they see the world. No longer is there a Democrat standing over the fence with their Republican neighbor – somebody moves out of the neighborhood because they’re not like everyone else.

They showed in this book that actually when people got together and spoke to people who disagreed with them politically they became more entrenched in their beliefs, rather than open to a different opinion.

Those are the barometers that show us that this change is not small but transformative. We know these transformational changes in Judaism, and what we’ve found is that religion has one of two responses. It either becomes a breaker wall that says, “No change, unacceptable, I’m going to fight it” and that’s what we’re seeing throughout the world. Or, what we have seen in history is that religious institutions and religion are at the forefront of saying, “Let’s go into the change, take the best of the change by keeping our basic values but by understanding that we are living in a world of change - we’ve done it many times before.”

To help people negotiate and navigate the change in the world, religious institutions have been at the forefront of that. We’ve taught people how to understand the change and keep values in other institutions in their life, whether it’s at work or at home, whether it’s with their friends or their acquaintances; that’s the best of what religion has done during these massive changes.

But there always have been those two responses. You can look at the rabbinic period of time and we’ll get a little history: (don’t get too fogged over here at nine o’clock). What’s amazing is that during this rabbinic period of time, no longer could Jews support the temple’s sacrifices. We were off the land; we weren’t farmers any longer; we weren’t shepherds any longer. We couldn’t bring sacrifices; we had to buy sacrifices. That wasn’t going to last long. So what happened was that those people who were born into power, the priests, the Sadducees, gave way to the rabbis, to the rabbinic period of time that said, “You know what? You can actually move out of the world you were born into. You can advance on your own through knowledge and you can become a rabbi and become a leader and become a teacher.”

These are vastly different ways of knowing. The priests put up the breaker wall. The rabbis leaned into the change. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see any sacrifices here. They’re gone. The zealots? They’re gone. We are the inheritors of the rabbinic tradition. We have survived that transformational change.

We had it in the Enlightenment period, as well, when opportunities were open to Jews that had never been open before. And there was a need to understand how to negotiate modernity with tradition and that’s how the Reform movement was born. We are the fastest growing movement of today, but don’t get too excited: because actually, compared to other movements, we are the fastest growing, but the fastest growing “movement” is unaffiliated Jews – that’s fifty percent of our community.

The change is interesting because what you have to understand as we move through change is that there are eternal truths. The L’dor V’dor – from generation to generation - to teach Judaism to the children and grandchildren head to head - that is an everlasting value that will remain no matter what change comes its way. The idea of educating our children, of giving them the tools of Judaism: Hebrew, and Jewish history, and Jewish tradition – that will not change. The idea of tikkun olam – the idea of caring for this broken world – that is not going to change. But we need to figure out how to communicate and do those things differently if we’re going to be relevant in the twenty-first century.

There’s a great Hassidic tale. You know Hassidism? It actually began in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. And so did trains, and so did the telegraph, and so did the telephone – major technological changes at the time. So the disciples of a Rebbe wanted to know what to do with all these newfangled, amazing technological wonders. And so they said, “Please, Rebbe, tell us: what do we learn from the train?” The Rebbe thought a minute, turned to his disciples and said, “Sometimes, if you’re a second late, you miss everything.”

“Okay. What about the telegraph? What do we learn from the telegraph, Rebbe?” And the Rebbe said, “Every one of your words is counted and paid for.”

“And what do we learn from the telephone, Rebbe?” “Oh, that one’s the best. What you say here is heard over there.”

The Rebbe got it. He understood that transformational change is not something to ignore but it’s something to adapt to, to reinterpret and reinvigorate our tradition, to respond to the changing nature of the world outside. You see, there are questions to be had in the world we live in, the world that is no longer full of authority but goes to autonomy, the world that was once hierarchical and now is networked, the world where communication and knowledge were the basis and the ownership of only a few, and now are democratically accepted and understood. With a click of the mouse you can Google anything and you can become an expert on Moses Maimonides; you don’t have to go to rabbinical school to learn it.

Here we have a world that is so different, where people can get anything, anytime, anywhere, and really, from anyone. And in that world we can say, “Not allowed” or we can say, “Well, what does that mean?”

So here are what I think are some essential questions to be asked about this world. If we can say whatever we want, whenever we want, and it will become viral, when do we decide not to say it? When do we guard our language and our words and our tongue? In Judaism, Shmirat Halashon, to guard your speech. What happens in a world that is just turned on 24/7 – it is on all the time and we can plug in. I just had a parent say, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to talk to my teenager – she Skypes, she IMs, she has Face time, and oh, by the way, is watching television doing all of those things.”

When do we decide to turn it off? To save our souls: that’s Shabbat. And when we live in a world that values power and we can have it, when do we find our humility and give the dignity to every human being, even the person who answers the phone? That is Derech Eretz : it is making sure you’re civil to everyone, even if you have more power.

And what happens in a world when I can get whenever I want at any time: what do I decide is important and not something to just throw away? That’s Ba'al Tashchit: to not destroy.

And when, when do we decide that the person who disagrees with us is just not summarily wrong, and we become more entrenched? When do we open ourselves up to change? That’s Rosh HaShana, that’s T’shuvah, that is understanding that each of us are B'tzelem Elohim, created in the image of God. We have a lot to have a conversation about because the world out there will take us for a ride. Every day each of us gets 5,000 messages to buy, buy, and buy. Whether you turn on your computer and the advertisements are right there; whether you walk into a coffee shop and it is constantly telling you to make sure you have this logo and that logo; meeting somebody in the halls of school – whatever they wear is telling you to buy what they wear. So we can abdicate our responsibility to the world out there but that would be exactly what we’re doing, we’re abdicating our responsibility.  We have to talk about real life. That’s what religion in the twenty first century and any century is. It’s making sure we have conversations about real life things that affect you and bring the values of Judaism and the tradition of Judaism to compare it to, to talk about, to incorporate.

I promise you that at Temple Israel in the years to come we will mediate the world out there; we will make sure that there are many doors and one roof; that people can come in at different portals to experience Judaism and we’ll meet them where they are, and that we will get out of this building to meet them where they are. In coffee shops, in bars, in places where young people congregate, we will be there. And we will ask those important questions. We will mediate between this Jewish world and the non-Jewish world and bring our friendships and our religious understandings of diversity back into this sanctuary. We have done it throughout time. We will make sure that Judaism is accessible to all, whatever our special needs are. Those are the things that we have to work on and do in order to remain relevant in the twenty first century. Religion as a breaker wall does not work. A porous wall, open doors, a welcome mat: those are the images of tomorrow.

And so, in the tradition of that nineteenth century Hassidic rabbi, the Rebbe, I ask you, what do we learn from streaming our Rosh HaShanah service? We learn that even though we can’t see the people, we touch them, we move them, they’re connected to us, even when they can see us.

And what do we learn from Facetime? Maybe that we can imagine and examine the fact that we hold people in the palm of our hands.

And what about You Tube? Well, I think that’s clear: that every action and every word can come back, it can come back directly to you. It is known, and it will be judged. L’Shanah Tovah.

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