Yom Kippur: Morning Service

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2020/5781

In the words of poet Langston Hughes:

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back before we understood why hindsight’s 2020

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

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

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

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

Don’t you sit down on the steps

’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us not turn back, 

Let us not sit down on the steps, 

‘cause we find its kind of hard,

Let us keep going,

Keep climbing up,

This day when we choose life.

Yom Kippur

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2019/5780

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

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

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

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

Essentially, the three roles of the Israelite prophet are:

1. When the people have misbehaved the Prophet says: You have messed up and you’re gonna suffer!

2. When the suffering begins the Prophet says: You see, I told you so!

3. And finally, a message very important to this holiday of Yom Kippur:God is ready and willing to still deal kindly with you if and when you mend your ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yom Kippur

Sermon by Rabbi Tobias Moss
2019/5780

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

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

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

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

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

How?

How come? 

How is it so?

How do we proceed?

How is God involved?

How is God absent?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yom Kippur

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2019/5780

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yom Kippur: Truth

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2018/5779

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s not be snake oil salesmen to ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s a fact.

Yom Kippur

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2018/5779

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yom Kippur: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Barry Cytron
2017/5778

Written text of Rabbi Cytron's sermon is not available. Please enjoy the video of this Yom Kippur Sanctuary Service.

Yom Kippur: It’s Not About the Bloodline

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2017/5778

The good news in the year 5758 is that it has never been cooler to spit into a test tube. Why? Because after decades of scientific study and billions of dollars of research funding, you can determine your entire genetic code for about $350 dollars. That’s right, it’s now possible to find out exactly who you are!

Companies like 23andMe.com, or Ancestry.com now offer DNA tests that promise to pinpoint a customer’s heritage and even identify genetic relatives. Apparently people are quite eager to know where they came from, and find a familial context that may be lacking. Behold, the answers hidden in my DNA will shed light on hidden events that occurred decades or even centuries earlier and will forever change my family narrative! However, before you go down that windy road you might want to consider a few of the interesting results folks have discovered about themselves.

Bob Hutchinson grew up in a home where there was not a single photograph of his mother when she was a child or any pictures of her parents. She had always told her son Bob that she was an only child, and that her parents were dead. Her heritage, she said, was Italian and Swedish. Bob suspected there was more to the story and found his mother’s childhood home listed in a 1930 census. The family had lived in Montclair, N.J., and was described as “Negro.” Through genetic testing Bob learned what no one had ever told him, that he had African American heritage.

There are some interesting, if less profound physical discoveries people are making about themselves through this genetic testing. Like possessing a variant in the gene marked rs4481887 – everybody get that - which indicates the probability that you are among the few people in the world who are unable to detect that unique odor when you pee after eating asparagus. And hey, isn’t that worth $350 right there??

I myself would shell out the $350 bucks to map my genome, but I already know what they are going to tell me – that I’m lactose intolerant!! I paid $20 for a Hello Pizza the other night and found that out! Hello!?

Then there is the fellow named Mark, a banker from Delaware, who got his test results back from Ancestry.com along with a list of relatives in its database. He was thrilled to find out about his new found mishpocha until he noticed that there was nobody at all on the list from his father’s side of the family. He did, however, recognize the name of his father’s best friend. A banner day for Mark.

And full disclosure: The mechanics of the system haven’t been perfected quite yet. One woman got lipstick mixed in with her tube-spit and received word she was some sort of alien mutant. (Ok, maybe not…)

But my all-time personal favorite has to be the anti-Semitic skinhead who found out he had 37% German-Jewish background, which I guess makes him an Ashke-NAZI. Poor guy. That’ll get him kicked out of the club.

Of course there are sound medical reasons to have one’s DNA tested to learn of one’s potential for carrying a Jewish genetic disease, or knowing the one’s chances of getting certain cancers or other diseases, can be literally life-saving.

On the other hand, there is the darker question of who exactly is collecting all this data and what might they be using it for? Should I be worried that the CEO of Ancestry.com happens to be married to one of the founders of Google? I don’t know. Maybe?

And then there is the “Brave New World” conversation about our evolving potential to choose the genetic makeup of our own offspring. Yes, I’d like my child to have blue eyes, be musically proficient, brilliant at mathematics, athletically fit, or most importantly, lactose tolerant so she can eat Hello Pizza. But Jews know all too well the hazards of a society bent on manufacturing an ideal race.

Still, millions of people around the world are testing themselves, and I have to wonder, what are we really trying to find out in this quest? Is the reason for our existence revealed in our genetic code?

Are we maybe searching for each other? Maybe our 21st century minds just want demonstrable proof that we are linked. That on the level of soul we know that people from different countries, dissimilar ethnic backgrounds and competing ideologies are all in this together and that we don’t need to settle scores violently?

Whatever the case, our Jewish tradition teaches us that biology is not destiny. We are not preprogrammed machines. The genetic material we are born with does not make us who we are. Nor does it condemn us to a firm set of character traits that we cannot control. If we believed that there would be no need for the Torah or ethical religious teaching. And there certainly would not be a need for Yom Kippur!

The Torah portion chanted this morning reveals an important fact: The covenant, it says, is binding upon “all of you who are standing here today as well as those of you not standing here today” – a direct reference to all those who will, regardless of their genetic heritage, at some future time join the club.

And note also that the covenant includes the woodchopper and the waterdrawer. We know, from Biblical studies, and a close look at the book of Joshua in particular, that those hackers and shleppers were, in fact, not ancient Hebrews, but members of the local Gibeonite tribe who decided to hang out with us after the conquest of Canaan! So what? I hear you say. It matters! The Torah wants us to know that Judaism is not implicitly a religion of bloodline. It is an ethical, moral, ritual way of living that can and has been adopted by millions throughout our history. The covenant does not run through the blood in the veins - it exists in the deeds done by the hands that encase those veins, and the hearts that pump that blood!

Yes, it is certainly the case that for thousands of years our tradition has emphasized the religion of the biological mother as a determinant of one’s status. But don’t forget that 34 years ago our Reform Movement upended that tradition once and for all, courageously proclaiming that how we raise our children is far more crucial than the biological line of the father or the mother. Much of the Jewish world still takes issue with that landmark decision, and yet this is the shape of things to come. Judaism 100 years from now will look very little like it does today, and I guarantee you that Jewish people ourselves certainly will not. For example, one out of every 5 Jews currently on the planet is a person of color.

And yet isn’t it amazing that there are still Jews in this world who look at the Jew by choice and say: yeah, well you weren’t born Jewish! So what. Good luck finding a Jew who can trace herself back to the wandering Israelites. My wife Barb would like to know exactly which ancient Hebrew tribe she can attribute her beautiful curly red hair, light skin and freckles. None, of course.

Here are some things that having little to nothing to do with your genetic code: your biology didn’t bring you here. There is no Darwinian survival of the fittest that says Yom Kippur is good for the gene pool. It is not required. Or the young people leading us today and taking responsibility for their own identities. Do we ask them: which of your parents gave you which part of your genome? No, you chose to do this!

We are taught that the universe was created through an act of divine will. The world was created on purpose, with purpose, and each of us was created for a good reason. To contribute something unique the world has never seen before you came along! Your biology may be firmly established, but whether you choose to grow your soul, or allow that soul to wither and dry up in your biological shell is entirely up to you.

The 23andMe.com readout won’t indicate if you a white supremacist or a tzaddik – There is no gene strand for hatred and bigotry. The readout won’t tell you that you’ll live a life of doing mitzvahs or if you will be entirely selfish through the years allotted to you. And it will not tell you today whether you are going to be willing to forgive other people for what they did to you last year.

A friend was telling me recently a woeful story about how deeply painful it was that she and her son had not spoken to one another in over 20 years. “He is the way he is,” she said, “and I am the way I am, just some bad chemistry. Maybe we both have the stubborn gene.” I don’t believe there is such a thing as a “stubborn gene”. Yom Kippur tells us that it doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to be stubborn. do we really believe that there is some strange biological destiny that precludes us from asking for forgiveness or forgiving? This holiday asks us to move outside our “nature” to take that chance.

My baby brother, the youngest of four, came into our lives 5 years after my sister, to everyone’s joy and surprise. One evening when he was about 20 years old we were sitting around the dinner table talking about our family and as he was sipping his soup looking down at the bowl he said: “Wow, can you imagine how horrible it would be to find out that you were an unintended birth?” And my sibs and I looked at each other thinking: Oh – My – God - He doesn’t know??

We are all, even the most planned baby in the bunch, mistakes. And, as my pit-bull, shepherd, boxer-mix dog Flora likes to remind me on a regular basis: You are also a mutt buddy! If you look at it from a bloodline standpoint we are all mistakes, chance occurrences. We’re all mutts. Beautiful human accidental people who, by the way share 95% of our DNA with a fruit fly. This afternoon some of us will find ourselves at the part of today’s YK ritual called Yizkor. And during Yizkor there will be that period of silence for 5 minutes or so when we think about our beloved late parents and grandparents and great grandparents. We will reflect on how much we miss them. Many of us will roll our eyes at how much we seem to be turning out like them. Still others will meditate on the gifts they brought us, the wisdom we gained from them. How much they strived to bless us with only the best of their character, and yet how much of their mishegas got through to us as well.

In some cases we will think of how hard we struggled not to become our parents, and here we are behaving so similarly to them. Yes, we share a good deal of DNA with them, but we are hardly identical. Ideally we take the best of their material, and sculpt original lives inspired by them.

This emerging science may tease us into believing that biology is destiny. But our Jewish tradition, and this holiday itself, proclaim that we are still in charge. Far from being the latest chemical soup of genetic material, we are Divine creatures who will make choices every day in this coming year that affect the world, and each other, in ways that only we uniquely can. So go ahead and spit in a tube if you want to. Find out where you come from… enjoy… But remember that the challenge of these holidays is to write original material into our books of life.

Your handwriting may resemble someone else out there in your inherited past, but the story? The story is all yours.

Yom Kippur: Misrepresentation

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2016/5777

Twice this past year I was asked to serve as a dramaturge for two local stage productions. I was deeply honored to be considered as a dramaturge, and to celebrate the occasion, I dashed off to consult Webster’s Dictionary to determine what a “dramaturge” is! I guess I had always thought a dramaturge was a person with a burning desire to act on the stage… but I come by this honestly... When my mother first came to this country and heard about Jewish Social Action, she thought it meant mixed dancing at Hillel.

So it turns out a dramaturge is a literary editor who works with both cast and director on a production for various purposes – to correct inaccuracies, to  help shape the play, and perhaps to advise on the effect it might have on the audience and so forth.

The first of the two plays was a musical about an Eastern European Jewish woman with a script that employed several Yiddish words and phrases. I think the most valuable contribution I made to this production may have been when I pointed out to the lovely young Lutheran actress that the dumplings in Grandma Sophie’s soup are not to be pronounced “crap-lach”. Yes, you’re welcome.

The second, and trickier, assignment was to assist a local cast in understanding some of the nuances of Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Jew Shylock in The Merchant of Venice for an upcoming production. To the credit of the director and producers, they were very conscientious about grappling with the significance of staging a play like Merchant in the Twin Cities, circa 2016. What did it mean historically? What does it mean today, to an audience here?

So they invited me to a pre-rehearsal discussion where I admitted up front that I am no Shakespearean scholar, nor do I play one on TV, but that I do have some working knowledge of the history of anti-Semitism and how this particular play has been used over the centuries to discredit and defame the Jewish people. The character of Shylock is firmly entrenched in the Western Canon and almost synonymous with greed, avarice, and blood-vengeance. The very word Shylock is a verb meaning to lend money at extortionately high rates of interest.

I thought the cast should be aware that no fewer than 50 different productions of Merchant took place during the reign of the Third Reich in Germany. One of Hitler’s personal favorites, he hired shills to be in the audience and to hoot and hiss when Shylock came on stage lest there be any uncertainty about how the Jew was being portrayed.

I also told the cast that relevant to staging The Merchant of Venice in present day Minnepolis/St. Paul is the historical fact that this place was, at one time, outside of Europe itself, the most viciously anti-Semitic spot in the world, with broad, fabricated, absurdly false representations of Jews coming out of the likes of Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Radio minister Charles Coughlin, and Pastor William Riley who used plastic, oversimplified texts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to school their adherents.

A member of the cast asked “What exactly did William Shakespeare really know about Jews?” Good question. Probably not that much, given that almost all of England’s Jewish population had been expelled in the 13th century and had not since returned. The playwright may well have been working off of the same mythology about Jews as anyone in his audience in 1596.

And then there is the fact that 16th century Venice is known, among other things, for introducing the word “ghetto” into the lexicon. The Jews of Venice were confined to one section of Venice called Geto, where their commerce was limited and they wore the identifying little red caps.

Now, I didn’t want to totally bum the cast out - even though, being good actors, they smiled politely during my diatribe. So I told them, hey, it ain’t all bad. If we learn anything from studying the works of Shakespeare, and any great literature we see that well-developed human characters are deeply nuanced, Shylock included. You can label any person as a typical this or that, but you will almost certainly misrepresent their unique nature. The greatest authors and playwrights surely knew this.

There is a wonderful YouTube video made some years ago of actor Patrick Stewart demonstrating three distinctively different ways in which the character Shylock can be and has been portrayed. Using Shylock’s well known dialogue with Antonio and Bassanio in the first act, Stewart first interprets Shylock as noble, dignified member of a persecuted race; then as a greedy, vengeful bloodthirsty monster (as Stewart was originally directed to play the part); then again a third time as humorous and jocular. To the actor’s credit, he refused to portray the character in only one dimension.

Labeling any large group of people in politics, art, or in casual “locker room banter” has huge consequences in a world that desperately seeks a sound bite.  We want to sum up the totality of a race, a religion, nationality or gender in 140 characters or less. When we use stereotypes, or succumb to believing a stereotype, we grossly misinform ourselves about people. We quickly lose sight of individual integrity. We do not serve humanity. We verbally ghettoize people.

I think that a mitigating factor for the cast of Merchant might have been that the hatred portrayed lies so distantly in the past; it is old, a signature of its time and place. An historical curiosity. And there might be some truth in that.

But even a cursory glance at a Parisian newspaper, circa 2016, will reveal that Jew-baiting is alive and well in Europe. Someone not long ago mounted a kippah-cam, a small video recorder on top of a Yarmulke and walked through Paris, and the footage documented the person being spat upon repeatedly, not unlike the opening scene of Merchant of Venice some 500 years earlier.

And though the British expulsion of the Jews may indeed have occurred 8 centuries ago, you can still consult a modern edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and find the only proper noun that doubles as a verb is the word “Jew,” meaning to bargain with someone in a miserly or petty way.

Deborah Lipstadt taught us here several years ago, and discussed her then recent victory in the libel case against her by Holocaust denier David Irving. It was a big story at the time because it brought to light how a single person with a re-imagined narrative and a gross misrepresentation can mold public opinion about and discredit an entire people.

Deborah’s story is again the public eye as the film Denial has just been released. In one of the early scenes she makes it clear that she is willing to engage anyone in a discussion who wants to talk about various details, specifics, figures, but that she will not debate a person who denies, wholesale, that the Holocaust occurred. Such a claim, Lipstadt says, sheds no light on anything. Such a voice seeks to conceal, not to enlighten. Such a position seeks to misrepresent, not to portray. And the Jewish people are people who always err on the side of shining the spotlight on the human condition, not obliterating it with falsifications.

Lipstadt has more recently referred to a form of “soft-core” Holocaust denial in the use of false comparisons. “What we have now,” she writes, is where you label Jews as using Nazi-like tactics.” You may disagree with Israel’s policies on a gazillion things, but they are not behaving like the Nazis. You can say that the Palestinians are being mistreated but Israel is most certainly not committing genocide. Those terms are applied by people who either seek to demean the Shoah or paint a gut wrenching slanderous picture of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Our children on University campuses are bearing the brunt of this insidious misinformation.

Why do we as a people get so upset about stereotyping? Is it not because we know the consequences of reducing human beings to a broad insulting caricature? Is it not because we celebrate this very day our ability to match our outer self with our inner self; that the two may be in harmony? Because this is a holiday devoted to the ardent study of human character and the potential for improvement? A holiday that abandons false labels and asks us to make our books of life decidedly non-fictional works?

A member of the cast then asked the elephant-in-the-room question: Rabbi, should this play be produced anywhere? Should it be banned from the stage?

No, I thought, and said as much. This is not how we roll. Jews are not in the habit of squelching dialogue. Jews do not support keeping discourse, or art, or literature or performance hidden from view. Better to reveal. Better to put it out there and discuss it. We are, after all, the people of revelation.

I noted that when Professor Suzannah Heschel, intellectual and scholar, was once asked if she thought Merchant of Venice should be banned and she said: “No, that would be a treason against western civilization. You might as well go live on the moon,” she said.

And while I agree with Dr. Heschel, I couldn’t help but note that in the movie Selma a couple of years back, her father, the great Jewish philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was unceremoniously airbrushed out of the pivotal March scene, no longer linked in history with Dr. King whom he stood alongside, praying with his feet. And you can certainly fact-check that!

Film, like the stage, is largely director’s media. You can tell the story in any way you want. Your characters can tell you how to feel.

Whether it is in the news, or in art or music, or in political discourse during an especially nasty election season, there are always going to be people who mess with the facts and spin the world to support their goals. Who cavalierly malign and label groups of people as though they were not possessed of a unique soul.

The Jewish people have been on the receiving end of this for too long. We know very well what it is to have our humanity stripped away and homogenized with a yellow-star or a red cap.

I excused myself from the meeting with the cast telling them I had to return to my day job of preparing for the upcoming holidays. I thought about the meaning of this great and awesome day on which Jewish people endeavor to harmonize the inner and the outer self. We are complex. We cannot be summed up in a sound bite. That the height of this day comes at that moment of true atonement – when we achieve at-one-ment. When the outer person who interacts with the world is the same as the individual we know dwells inside.

We do not shy away from facts. Not about the world. Not about others. Not about ourselves. We know that the more we look into our own traditions, the more we learn about ourselves and the people around us. We pride ourselves in being an or-la-goyim, a light to the nations. Darkness and obfuscation and misrepresentation are not our allies.

We as a people eternally represent all those who have been slandered, all who have been labeled, disenfranchised, mistreated, abandoned.

If you chance to be in New York and go see the latest Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof you may be disappointed to see that it does not open immediately with the Tradition piece. Instead you see a bearded man wearing a modern parka, reading a book in a subway with the Cyrillic lettered Anatevka on the wall behind him. Soon it is revealed he is Tevye the milkman and the show commences as it has done for 50 years.

At the conclusion of the play, as the Jews are led out of their “Geto” fearing a coming pogrom, the modern immigrant character reemerges and joins them in their search for a new home, taking his place in the long and tortured history of forced immigration.

Ninety-one-year-old Sheldon Harnick, the original Fiddler lyricist, who penned the words: “to life, to life, l’chaim!” had veto power over any major changes to the show and was asked about that one.

No, he said. It’s fine. It’s perfect. That is our tradition. That is who we are.

Yom Kippur: Forgiveness

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2016/5777

I got a new name! Okay, I got married and decided to change my name.

As friends, family and community learned of my engagement, I began to receive a lot of advice about marriage.  Having never been married before, I was happy for any insight and anecdotes.  The advice included well-known adages such as: “never go to bed angry,” and “pick your battles.”  Others that I had not thought of: “If you have kids, make sure to take vacations without them.”  Or ones from blogs: “Never compromise; in every argument someone will have a stronger opinion and that person should win.”  One piece of advice I found particularly intriguing comes from “the Notorious RBG” – Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  When asked if she has any advice to share with the public, she often quotes her mother-in-law: “In every good marriage, it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” [i]

How I interpret this, and most advice given about marriage or any relationship, is that when living with another person you must be able to ask for and grant forgiveness.  It sounds so easy, but both asking for and granting forgiveness is extremely hard.  To ask for forgiveness we must admit that we have made a mistake, al cheit, we have sinned, we have missed the mark.  None of us likes to be wrong.  You can ask Mike: I am no exception.  It is painful to admit when we are incorrect.  It hurts our ego and our pride.  Recently a girl friend of mine sent me a picture that truly depicts this difficulty.  It was of her oldest son crying.  He had been misbehaving and needed to apologize.  Instead of saying “sorry” he lay on the ground crying: “It hurts too much to say I’m sorry.” Out of the mouths of babes can come the most profound statements.  

(Last night Rabbi Zimmerman spoke to us about non-apology, apologies, but what does it take to truly ask for and grant forgiveness).   It is very hard to say “I’m sorry,” but this very action is critical to enduring relationships and healthy communities.  If it were easy to ask for forgiveness, we would not need a designated time in our calendar to ensure that we are performing teshuva, repentance.  This process starts during the month of Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah.  And it continues through the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  And for those of us late tax filers, our tradition says that if you need still more time, the window of repentance stays open until Sukkot!  To assist us in our repentance, the great teacher Maimonides provides specific instructions on how to perform t’shuva.  First, we have to confess, verbally, what we did wrong, and we have to do it in detail.  We cannot just say: “I was selfish.” Instead, we are to say, “My husband asked me to play golf with him, but four hours on the golf course sounded extremely boring so I said ‘no’,” or something of that sort. And then, we apologize to the person we harmed.  We are to do this openly and explicitly.  We are to resolve not to make the same mistake again.  If there is anything that we can do now to repair the damage, we are to do so.  Then, and only then, our rabbis teach, we have the right to ask for forgiveness.

You see, t’shuvah is more than an apology. T’shuvah is a serious, deep process which is meant, ultimately, to lead to self-improvement.  That's why our sages teach that a person knows t’shuvah is complete only when he or she resists committing the same sin again. The ultimate goal is not to obtain forgiveness from someone else, or to wipe away our sense of guilt. The ultimate goal is to become a better person – the kind of person who would not cause this harm in the first place. [ii] When we truly atone for our sins, when we perform t’shuva, repentance, our changed behavior redeems our past actions and enables us to move forward. 

This process of t’shuva is very hard.  Many people decide to skip it.  They have no desire to look into their hearts and souls and uncover the motivations that caused them to bring about such pain.  Such heartbreak.  Instead, there may be an insincere apology, or nothing at all.  There are, however, stories of people willing to engage in this difficult endeavor.  The New York Times Magazine recently featured the stories of reconciliation still taking place in Africa, as a result of the Rwandan genocide that occurred in the mid-1990s .  Their piece, entitled “Portraits of Reconciliation,” featured pictures of Hutu perpetrators and Tutsi survivors working to rebuild relationships, 20 years after the Hutu murdered almost one million Tutsi.

With the help of a small non-profit organization, the Hutu are engaging in the very notions set forth by Maimonides, (okay they may not know it is Maimonides, but it is).  The Hutu learn the true consequences of their actions.  They gain understanding of the deep loss and pain they caused.  They uncover what actions and stereotypes they need to change in order to move forward.  They serve time in jail.  They rebuild homes and provide food for the Tutsi.  Then, and only then, after many months of counseling, do they formally ask the Tutsi they wronged for forgiveness.  The Hutu did the hard work of t’shuva.  

One Hutu perpetrator noted: “My conscience was not quiet, and when I would see [the woman that I harmed] I was very ashamed. After being trained about unity and reconciliation, I went to her house and asked for forgiveness. Then I shook her hand. So far, we are on good terms.” 

The work of the Tutsi – the victims –  is just as difficult.  Many of us could never imagine the grace, the understanding, the compassion it takes to pardon someone who murdered our children, our spouse.  The women in these stories lost everything.  Still, they dug into the depths of their souls and found the sympathy and charity to grant mercy to their enemies. They were able to let go of the anger and hatred that had been controlling their lives. They came to understand that revenge would not give them the peace they could attain with forgiveness. 

One Tutsi survivor writes: “He killed my father and three brothers. He did these killings with other people, but he came alone to me and asked for pardon. He and a group of other offenders who had been in prison helped me build a house with a covered roof. I was afraid of him — now I have granted him pardon, things have become normal, and in my mind I feel clear.”

Rwanda is a wonderful example of what can occur when we have the strength and determination to ask for and grant forgiveness.  Musical genius Lin Manuel Miranda expresses the difficulty and reward that comes with this process in his musical Hamilton. (I still have not seen it but I can’t help but use its brilliance!).  Hamilton and his wife Eliza have just been through two devastating events.  First, Hamilton has an affair and publishes the details of it in order to avoid blackmail.  Then, their eldest son is killed in a duel defending Hamilton’s honor.  It is hard to imagine that Eliza will ever forgive Hamilton for these transgressions, but Hamilton apologizes and then waits.  He says:

I don’t pretend to know

The challenges we’re facing

I know there’s no replacing what we’ve lost

And you need time

Just let me stay here by your side

And we learn that for Eliza: 

There is a grace too powerful to name

We push away what we can never understand

We push away the unimaginable

She takes his hand 

And they find their way back to one another. 

Forgiveness. Can you imagine? They are going through the unimaginable.

Around the world we see countries that have done the unimaginable.  They have found a path to healing through forgiveness.  We can look to South Africa where in place of trials, Nelson Mandela created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  Here, victims and perpetrators were allowed to tell their stories.  Through restorative justice, not revenge, the wounds healed and the country moved forward.  We can look to Ireland, where after over 30 years of fighting a peace agreement was reached that included a power-sharing government with political forces that had been aligned with armed groups on each side of the conflict.  We can look to the work that is being done by individuals in Israel.  The Parents Circle-Families Forum (PCFF) is a grassroots organization bringing together Palestinian and Israeli families who have lost immediate family members due to the conflict. They believe that a process of reconciliation is a prerequisite for achieving a sustained peace.  In each one of these cases, people on both sides of a conflict come together, face one another, look into each other’s eyes and see the humanity of their enemy.  In these powerful moments and through much hard work, fear and hatred gave way to compassion and tolerance.  We can only hope and pray that this same peace will come to countries currently engaged in civil war.

There are also times when we choose forgiveness, not because we have been asked, but because we understand that the hatred and fury we hold in our hearts is debilitating to us, while not affecting the perpetrator.  Nelson Mandela teaches this lesson well.  As he was leaving prison after 27 years, he is quoted as saying: “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”  He understood that he would only be free if he could release the shackles of anger.  Otherwise he would be grasping a hot coal with the intent of harming another, but he would be the one who got burned. [iii] Through forgiveness, Mandela accepted the reality of what happened to him and found a way to live in a state of resolution.  He was able to identify, fully feel, express and then release his rage and his pain, and find healing.

The people of Charleston, SC, also found their way to forgiveness.  Last summer, you may remember, a gunman open fired in a church basement there.  Nine people were murdered and five survived.  Given the racial tensions in Charleston, the city could have erupted into riots, but instead, led by the survivors of the Emanuel Nine, Charleston erupted in grace. Within 36 hours of the killings, and with pain racking their voices, family members stood in a small county courtroom to speak the language of forgiveness [iv].  It happened suddenly when Nadine Collier, the daughter of murdered Ethel Lance spoke at the bond hearing.  She remembers being “angry and mad” because her mother had “more living to do.” At the same time, racing through her head were lessons she had learned long before: “You have to forgive people, because when you keep that hatred, it hurts only you.”

It was this courage of the Charleston survivors that brought about an outpouring of all races and ethnicities, who filled the streets with unity.  As a result of their grace, “within days of the shooting, the most contentious public symbol of South Carolina’s Civil War past, the Confederate flag, was finally removed from the state capitol” [v].  It was a truly remarkable feat of forgiveness that brought with it much healing.  Collier’s ability to forgive the pain and loss that she endured brought peace to her city.  As the Dalai Lama says: world peace can only develop from inner peace.

Right here in Minnesota, we show our own ability to forgive with our unwavering support of the Minnesota sports teams who seem to break our hearts over and over again.  Yet despite all of the (and I quote), “agony”, “dashed hopes” and dare I say “failure,” Minnesotans continue to bounce back and forgive!  

And still, I must acknowledge that there are times when forgiveness is not possible.  Abuses endured that can never be pardoned.  Some of these have been making the headlines recently – in the political debates, on college campuses and beyond.  We pray for the victims of such violence, those sitting here with us today, and those outside this sanctuary. We pray that they are able to find peace and healing despite the fact they may never be able to reconcile why or how this happened to them.  We wish that the sharing of stories through social media will show them they are not alone, and will give them courage to speak out.  We hope that accounts of unimaginable forgiveness will give those in pain strength and fortitude as they carry their burden.

The work of repentance and forgiveness is hard, but it is important and worthwhile work.  We are blessed with only one soul in this life. It is for us to determine how to fill it.  Will we fill it with self-righteousness and arrogance?  With anger and hatred?  With retribution and revenge?  Or will we work toward reconciliation and understanding, compassion and sympathy, peace and harmony?  As we begin this New Year, may we work to elevate our lives and our relationships to new heights.  May we use this time to bring to mind the mistakes we have made, the offences we have committed, the times we have missed the mark.  May we take our transgressions and turn them into opportunities for engagement and renewal.  May we engage in teshuva, in repentance, in order to return to our true and best selves and move forward into the New Year with deeper and more meaningful relationships.   May we find the strength, the courage and the resolve to forgive those who have wronged us.

The rabbis teach that the Torah begins with a bet – and not an aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet – for a reason.  It is because Bet is only open on one side, to the future.  May this season of repentance, of possibilities, and of new beginnings, give us all the strength to imagine forgiveness in order to move forward into a bright and meaningful future.

Gamer chatima Tova. May we be sealed in the book of life.

[i] Ginsberg, Ruth Bader. Ruth Bader Ginsbergs Advice for Living. New York Times October 1st, 2016.

[ii] Lew, Alan. This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared.

[iii] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/buddha104025.html

[iv] Time Magazine. How Do You Forgive a Murderer. David Von Drehle and Jay Newton-Small and Maya Rhodan. http://time.com/time-magazine-charleston-shooting-cover-story/

[v] Ibd.

Yom Kippur: Who I Want to Be

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2015/5776

My little brother Jack, well, maybe not so little, but ten years my junior, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Policy, just released a book on racial profiling – entitled Suspect Race—making me more than a little jealous because he beat me to the punch, publishing before I was able to release my forthcoming epic: When Bad Things Happen to Inappropriate Rabbis.

Obviously Jack’s book comes out at a relevant time, but my brother has been studying and teaching about discrimination for about 30 years. In his early days as a graduate student he designed an experiment to measure an individual’s racial bias, and he found an unlikely guinea pig, or maze rat, in his older brother who happened to be visiting.

Here’s how it worked. I was instructed to press a key on a computer keyboard indicating my immediate either positive or negative response to stimuli as it appeared on the screen. A series of random words flashed before me and I batted away at the keyboard, reacting negatively or positively as quickly as I could.

When I finished, Jack told me that the words I saw on the computer screen were not actually the ones I had been reacting to. Rather, I was responding to racially charged stereotypical words related to race, color, creed, nationality, like black, white, ghetto, rap, urban, gang, etc. that had flashed subliminally just before the word I actually saw.

“Oy” I thought. But I had to ask. “How did I do?” My brother replied: “You don’t want to know.”

Fast forward three decades to a couple of months ago when the Downtown Congregations to End Homelessness Steering Committee voted to do a self-assessment of our intercultural competence, both our individual and group orientations toward cultural differences and commonality. We felt that since our work in the field of homelessness so disproportionally affects folks of race and culture different from our own it might be good to know how facile we are in relating to this population.

Answering a 50 question Intercultural Development Inventory, we were then evaluated and placed on a continuum that ranged from denial, and polarization and defense – that is, an “us and them” place of avoidance, judgment and inability to recognize cultural differences; all the way up to adaptability and acceptance of the other; the ability to authentically shift one’s cultural perspective and appreciate others.

So a few weeks later we were given our group result, and where we were as individuals. Ten of us were scattered throughout the continuum, but two were way over there in denial-polarization-defense land.

I don’t know the identity of one of the two, but you are looking at the other one.

So somebody is going to ask you at the break-fast: What was the sermon about this morning? And you may be inclined to respond: “Well, basically Rabbi Glaser told the congregation he’s a racist”.

But before you do that, let me add something crucial to the conversation. There were actually two scores. One was the developmental score that I just mentioned – where you actually are, based on your life’s experiences and life-long development of attitudes. The other score was our self-perception – where I perceive myself to be on that continuum of multi-cultural sensitivity. Who I think I am.

And I am here to tell you that my own perception of my intercultural competence put me way up there at the cusp of acceptance and adaptation. Apparently I believe I am someone who recognizes, celebrates and appreciates cultural differences in my own and other people’s values, ways and behaviors.

My personal perception score – the look-who-thinks-he-is “multi-culturally aware” Sim Glaser, was immensely higher than my developmental. The profile interpretation workbook advised us that a difference of even seven points between the two scores indicates a significant overestimation of one’s intercultural competence.

My differential was 37 points.

Ok, I hear you thinking. Now I get it. Rabbi is a racist – he just doesn’t know it.

On the one hand, this could paint a picture of an individual who is clearly out of touch with his true nature. On the other hand, more positively, here is a person who aspires to be a much more culturally sensitive adaptable person than he actually is.

So I did some research and some soul searching, and I talked to a few folks.

First off I looked up “Racism” in the Webster’s where it says: “Racism is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” And I thought, naaah, that’s not me.

I asked my wife. Barb, source of all real wisdom in our household, do you think you are married to a racist? Her response was: “No honey, I think it means you just need to get out more often.”

I consulted a local Lutheran Minister who was on that steering committee that took the test, and she said: Well, you are being judgmental. Look at the number you are doing on yourself! This is not a shame and blame device – the disparity between your scores is a wonderful challenge!

And I made an appointment to speak with the person who administered the instrument to us. Her interpretation of the generous gap in my score was that I might simply be leading a smaller internal life than what I am capable of, and desirous of! She also mentioned that skewing to the polarization side is often a cultural safeguard for people who have been oppressed or persecuted.

I was comforted to learn that I am far from alone in this challenge. The intercultural development orientation, she said, is not static, rather it is a moving walkway, like the kind at the airport. Because of the way our society works and how we tend to associate most readily with people who are just like us – same color skin, same neighborhoods, same socio-economic status - if we stay on this walkway, we continue to be carried along and become further polarized and indifferent to a world filled with a variety of people. Even if we stand still and do nothing, the walkway will continue to carry us in that direction, because that is the way our society is designed.

However, when we reverse course, or choose to get off the walkway, this is when we can begin to make personal progress. This is where we begin to close the gap between who we are developmentally and who we aspire to be!

And this brings us to Yom Kippur. This is the differential holiday. This is the holiday of heshbon ha nefesh – of moral stock-taking. Not only: Who have we become over the course of our lives? But now that we know it, what the heck are we going to do about it?? Ok. So we opened the book of life, we filled out the questionnaire and saw the results. This is the day we declare that we do not have to accept what is written in those pages as immutable.

Human beings are capable of change. But when a human being finds out he is 37 points different from what he aspires to be, what then?

Just maybe this difference between who we are and who we want to be is the Divine part of ourselves calling out to us to be recognized! To be nurtured and developed!

On Yom Kippur the barriers are supposed to come down so we might acknowledge that our behavior has not matched what our souls know is the right way to behave. Or as one of my favorite bumper stickers reads: Dear God, help me to be everything my dog thinks I am.

Our aggregate score as a committee showed us that this is not only an individual issue, but an institutional one, and maybe even a state and national issue. How surprising it must have been to so many of us last week when the figures revealed that the wealth gap between whites and blacks in the self-described progressive state of Minnesota state is second only to Mississippi. How different is the gap between who we perceive ourselves to be as a society and who we really are?

I was pleased to note that the results of this test did not leave us without goals or homework. It begins with being brave enough to face your flaws, then noting, without judgment where you are. Then to develop a sense of curiosity about this huge world we could be a part of if we could just get out more often.

In a way, this is a very Jewish prescription. We are a deed leads to creed religion, so it makes perfect sense that in order to change our most basic selves we have to perform acts, do deeds, give ourselves missions and challenges in real time, with real people that are not part of our mono-cultural circle. And most seriously, to ask ourselves, what does it mean to remain mono-cultural in an era of Charleston, and Ferguson, and Baltimore.

Curiously, the workbook actually quantified what it takes to move one notch up on the continuum toward a positive more multi-cultural direction. About 40 hours of work. 40 hours!? I thought. I’ve have 60 years of experiences hardwired into me! In the book Outliers Malcolm Gladwell says you need 10,000 hours to become something you are not yet! But not so with the work of sensitizing ourselves to others. Maybe there is a Divine source of energy that just wants us to succeed. The opposite of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. Softening the heart can be accomplished in 40 hours! What a concept! Yom Kippur is the Jewish antithesis of “original sin” which we do not teach. We are not stuck on that moving walkway. We can reverse course, and we can get off.

The workbook goes on to encourage taking opportunities to have personal interactions with members of other groups, to travel, but not in a bubble like where you visit a foreign city but wind up eating at Applebee’s, or instead of insisting that everyone there speak to you in your language you learn some of the local vernacular. Or that you keep an intercultural journal, or widen your artistic tastes to include theater, music and film that depicts cultures other than your own.

A few days ago television history was made when in the year 2015 the best actress award went to a woman of color. Viola Davis, in her Emmy acceptance speech, quoted Harriet Tubman, speaking over a hundred years ago –

“In my mind I see a line… and over that line I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line, but I can’t seem to get there no-how. I can’t seem to get over that line.” The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.”

Opportunity, it seems, is the only thing that separates any of us from one another. Our divine selves can see that line that divides us, even as our structured, hard wired, developed, entrenched selves seem locked in a pattern of sameness. Today is the day to see that line, to acknowledge the higher self within us that wants to cross it, and to pledge to do so.

At this time of year we make pilgrimages to places where we can witness the grand beauty of the changing foliage. The multi-colored leaves that speak to us of God’s grand creation. We say ooh. We say ahhh… How do we go from that sense of wonder at the bold variety of fall colors right back to a fear or distrust of different colored faces?

I am not especially proud of my developmental test score, but I am excited by the Divine message my aspirational score has brought home to me. Like everyone else, I have work to do.

May we all be inscribed for blessing this year in the ever changing, ever evolving, ever growing books of our lives.

L’shana tova.

Yom Kippur: The Blessing of Failure

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2015/5776

This morning I would like to talk to you about the blessing of failure.

Moses - known as the greatest leader of the Jewish people, began his career reluctantly, terrified of the task placed before him.  As you may remember, Moses first encounters God at the burning bush.  God says to Moses:  “I am the Lord your God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  I have heard my people cry out to me from their enslavement and it is time for me to set them free.  I will send you to Pharaoh to bring forth my people.  Moses’ responded – and I paraphrase: “You must be kidding.  You want me to go up against Pharaoh?  You think that I can help you?  You definitely have me confused with someone else.  No one will ever believe that I have God on my side.  I am just a shepherd with a lisp.  Please God, choose someone else.”  In this moment Moses had no faith in himself.  He was afraid that he would fail and an entire nation would suffer the consequences.  

I make light of this dialogue, but Moses’ trepidation was very real.  We have ALL experienced doubts and concerns associated with the possibility of failure – whether in our professions, our relationships, our schooling or our finances. We might know, intellectually, that taking a risk is the right thing to do… but wow is it scary.  What if we can’t do it?  What if we fail?  We might be humiliated, we might cost our company, we might lose our job.  Life may not be exactly the way we want it, but what if we take a chance and end up worse off? This is the reason we try to protect ourselves and our children from failure. We are afraid that if we step outside our comfort zone there will be dire consequences rather than great reward.  We forget that so many of the most successful people – Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey - took big risks and faced failure. And here’s the thing – they needed to fail in order to succeed.

What better example of this than the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs?  Jobs, who never graduated from college, was fired from Apple – the company he created!  In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Jobs recalled the devastating public humiliation of being ousted, yet states “…. getting fired was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything, freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.  I had been rejected, but I still loved what I did, so I decided to start over.”  

I know what you are thinking.  It is easy to consider Steve Jobs failing.  He had the resources to take risks and not worry about paying the bills.  It is easier to take a chance when we do not have anything to lose – either because we have nothing, or because we are extremely successful. This is why many of the wealthiest people continually try new endeavors.  This is also why sociologists teach that, in the United States, 1st generation immigrants are particularly innovative. They come here looking for a better life; they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.   Political Junkie Ken Rudin suggests that to solve the immigration crisis we should all emigrate after three generations, and start over.  I am not advocating that we all get up and leave, but it is interesting to think about what happens once we are comfortable.   This is when the fear of going backwards restrains us from being creative.  Yet, even if we may not all invent the light bulb, we will all face disappointment in our lives and recognizing how to handle this may determine the outcome of our struggles. 

Knowing that failure is often critical to success, the question becomes how do we accept setbacks gracefully, and teach our children to do the same, when we are so afraid of it?  To do this we need to remember that failing rarely brings the dire consequences we anticipate. There is a famous story about one of the first IBM computer designs.  This computer had serious flaws and was quickly dropped from production.  The project manager, expecting to be fired, asked his boss if he should clean out his desk.  The supervisor replied: “We just spent several millions dollars training you.  Why would we want to fire you?”  This man cost his company and yet his boss understood that this would make him better at his job.  He learned so much about the consumer from his failure.  In addition the employee became more valuable because he showed IBM he could 1. Learn from the mistake, 2. Own it, 3. Fix it, and 4. Put safeguards in place to ensure the same mistake was not repeated. What an amazing lesson to know that failures are to be learned from, not to be ridiculed. 

If we can take risks and learn from our mistakes then we will set an incredible example for our children.  When my aunt was in her mid 40s – after raising three children – she decided to go to law school.  She had been out of school for years and had no idea if she would be able to get in, let alone do the work once she was there.  She ended up having an amazing three years of school and loved every day she practiced as a litigator.  She faced the possibility of failure and it changed her life for good.  She also set a powerful example for her children and nieces and nephews that it is never too late to fulfill your dreams. 

We have a hard time allowing children to fail.  We tolerate misjudgments when we teach them to ride bikes, ice skate, even drive a car.  They fall and we insist that they get back up and keep going.  Yet when it comes to school or relationships we have a much harder time letting go. 

I will never forget how impactful being allowed to fail was for me.  I was 15 and it was my first time behind the wheel of a car.   I was with my dad in his new sedan and we went for a drive around the neighborhood.  He told me to turn right, but I did not turn fast enough.  I ended up driving over the curb and over a sapling.  Yes, I drove over, not into, a tree.  The bottom of his car was punctured and, adding insult to injury, we had to go buy the city a new tree.  I was so embarrassed.  We then went home to tell my family what had happened.  My brother was relentless with the teasing comments. I assumed that as far as my father was concerned, I was done driving for a while, and frankly in that moment I would have been happy to never drive.   Still, the next day, my dad made me get right back in the driver’s seat and try again. I learned more about being a safe driver from my mistake – my failure – than from hours of drivers ed.

Not only did I learn about driving, I learned about making big and expensive mistakes. I learned they are painful, they are embarrassing, and they are scary.  I also learned that I have the ability to fail and that I have the resiliency to pick myself back up and continue.  Unfortunately, this cannot be taught any other way. When we protect ourselves and our children from defeat we rob them of these lessons. When we protect our children from failure we do not give them the tools to tackle the world on their own. We end up with young adults who do not believe in their own abilities.  Renowned therapist and author Dr. Wendy Mogel tells a wonderful story about getting into trouble as a child. When she would present her predicament to her father he would answer: “That is very interesting, how are you going to solve it.”  Mogel’s parents intuitively understood that children usually get themselves into age appropriate trouble and given time and encouragement they can get themselves out of their dilemma.

Psychologists agree that although, at the time, we feel that failure is the end of the world, it actually helps us to move on to the next stage of our lives. Letting kids mess up is tough and painful for parents. But it helps kids learn how to fix slip-ups and make better decisions next time.  Children who are allowed to fail, have a stronger sense of self.  “When they step into a situation, [resilient kids] have a sense they can figure out what they need to do and can handle what is thrown at them with a sense of confidence.”

Failing is not the end of the world, it is the beginning of a new challenge. Failure only becomes a serious problem when we confuse it with our self-identity.  Failing is not the problem; it is how we frame it that is the obstacle.  Rather than admitting we made a mistake we need to fix, we call ourselves failures.  We define ourselves by the setback.  This definitely does not help us learn from our blunder and move forward with new knowledge and confidence to face whatever comes in our way.

Moses, our teacher, leader, and law giver who is arguably the greatest individual of our tradition, failed over and over again.  Even with God's help, he had to go back to Pharaoh 10 times before the Israelites were freed.  After the crossing of the Red Sea, he goes up to receive the 10 commandments and returns to find the Israelites worshipping the golden calf.  Over and over again the people lose faith -- he loses patience and, finally, his temper. He fails to achieve his primary career goal, the ultimate promotion -- to enter the Promised Land.  And in the end, his failures teach us as much as his successes.  Moses teaches us that our goal is not to be perfect, but to improve the world even if it means we will face failure in the process.  On this Yom Kippur, as we stand before God with all of our imperfections, our fears, doubts, and anxieties, let us pray not for certainty but for courage, not for ease but for resilience, not for finitude but for faith, not to reach our destination but to embrace the mystery and wonder of the journey of our lives.

Yom Kippur: Healing, Yizkor and Nefesh Ne’ilah Services

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2015/5776

There is no text for this sermon. Please enjoy the video of this Yom Kippur Afternoon Healing, Yizkor and Nefesh Ne'ilah Services.

Yom Kippur: For Shame

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2014/5775

A few years ago a woman named Mary Bale was filmed on a security camera petting a stray cat, then picking it up and putting it in a trash bin. Within hours Mary Bale’s name and address were published on an internet forum. In practically no time at all she became an object of global, yes, global derision. Hundreds of hate pages popped up on Facebook calling for her imprisonment. One declared “Death to Mary Bale.” In response to all this an NYU Professor noted: “Social Media can be easily exploited for shaming. It is a good platform.” The judge who ultimately fined Ms. Bale, and prohibited her from henceforth owning any kind of pet whatsoever, took her international vilification into account in the sentencing.

My wife Barb just finished reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for a book group. I recall my own journey through The Scarlet Letter in my undergraduate English studies some time ago. The horror of public shaming. The pillory. The accused adulteress Hester Prynne, forced to stand on a scaffold before a self-righteous jeering crowd with a red capital “A” sewn onto her dress. That story takes place 350 years ago.

Each generation has had its way of dealing with shame. And somehow each generation has also found a way of transferring their own shame onto someone or something else in a voyeuristic manner.

The ancient Jewish tradition of sacrificial guilt offerings ended thousands of years ago with the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem. We don’t do that anymore. Sometimes when Christian groups tour our sanctuary I invite them up to the bima, and they ascend cautiously. I comfort them not to worry, the Jewish people gave up human sacrifice decades ago.

The Torah, however, does relate a rather bizarre tradition associated with this holiday of Yom Kippur, in which the ancient Israelites would seize a hapless goat, called the Azazel and attach their sins in the form of ribbons onto its horns, drive it out into the wilderness and chase it over a cliff’s edge where it would die, and, presumably, their sins would die along with it.

We’re going to (we tried) try this at the tot service this morning and see what happens (it was a disaster!) Crying. Pacifiers falling out of mouths. (Don’t ask). Maybe not.

At any rate, this Azazel would come to be translated in future English Bible translations as the “scapegoat” – a word we are today all too familiar with.

I’d like to believe that societally we have done away with this weird vicarious atonement ritual. We are, after all, blessed with this magnificent Yom Kippur day, also called: Shabbat Shabbaton, a Sabbath to end all Sabbaths! Rather than dealing with some surrogate atonement offering, we offer up our very selves, forecasting our own death. For ten days we have sought to make amends with those whom we may have hurt. And now we come, as a repentant community, before God to address our shameful deeds and ways.

Shame, in Hebrew busha, is the most ancient of human emotions. In the first chapters of the Torah, Adam and Eve find themselves naked in the Garden. Read the story closely and you will see that even as they are aware of their nakedness they feel no shame. It is only when their eyes are opened to the knowledge of right and wrong that their nudity becomes a problem. And what do they do about it? The cover it up in the flimsiest way. A couple of fig leaves. Clearly humankind will require thousands of years more to develop a proper ritual for dealing with shame.

Note the first homicide in the Torah… before there were commandments, before there was ritual atonement, before there was a Yom Kippur and a way of dealing with shame… Cain slays his brother Abel and he’s marked for life! The story horrifies us for many reasons, not the least of which is the very real fear of never being forgiven for something we have done.

On Yom Kippur the fig leaves come off our most private of parts, and the mark is taken off the forehead. On this day we acknowledge the burden of knowing right from wrong, and pledge to mend our ways. It is only in acknowledging our shame that we are able to move on.

Imagine if there was no way out of our shameful circumstances. Today Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is having a renaissance of sorts among teenagers who are studying it, and who totally get the notion of a well-publicized stigma that will not go away. The electronic pillory of internet shaming is all too real. This past year saw yet more completed suicides by young people who found images of themselves entered into cyberspace and seared into the consciousness of millions. Nobody gets marginalization like a shamed teenager. The Talmud teaches us that humiliation is worse than physical pain. It appears the scarlet A is alive and well.

Indeed, our vicarious atonement is at an all-time high. It is stunning to watch as people react to the viral on line spread of celebrity misdeeds. Hundreds of children and their parents lining up to return their Ray Rice Jerseys after the video of him slugging his girlfriend circulated on the web. The response to the news of running back Adrian Peterson’s violence to his child. The Jewish communal cringe at Donald Sterling’s unrepentant racist remarks causing him to “Foul Out” in a big way. The Beit Din, “The Court” of public opinion heard Sterling’s words, ruining his name and ending his tenure as owner of the Clippers Franchise. As though he now is branded with the mark of Cain, wherever he travels or when his name is spoken.

How easy it is for us to sit back smugly and observe other people’s lives thrown into the public arena as spectacles for our entertainment and our judgment.

As Jews we should know better than to be party to that kind of voyeurism and deflecting of our own shame that should have ended eons ago with Hester Prynne and the Azazel.

We have been gifted this holy day of repentance and forgiveness. For today our shame is not an indelible badge of dishonor, but rather a necessary element of our atonement process. Without shame we would never be driven to come clean. On this day we are given the Divine “out” by a God who understands human error and the potential for teshuva – for return and human growth.

Shame is powerful. It is real. But it was never meant to be a protracted experience. Yes it is supposed to hurt. Yes, we are to be consumed by it for a time, but ultimately each of us, and we’ve all been there, needs to work our way out of being shamed. This is the gift of Yom Kippur to humankind.

When we recite the viddui, the al cheit shechatanu l’faneicha – for the sins we have committed, note that we are required to do it as a group… in the first person plural. We do this for two reasons – first, lest we think the recited sin is not ours but someone else’s, we say it anyway, including ourselves just in case. And second, because we want those who just don’t get it to be included in our communal admission. Yes, in some cases we need to bring the light of atonement into someone else’s dark shame.

This summer we stood up for Israel’s right to defend herself against vicious rocket attacks. We were sickened at the wartime behavior of an enemy who would use children as human shields, and the abduction of innocent schoolboys. But when, the young Palestinian boy Mohammed Abu Khadeir was burned alive at the hands of vengeful Jews we all knew a terrible sin had been committed. Whether the individuals who perpetrated that crime understood their actions as sinful, or felt the slightest regret, we may never know. But this, we knew in our hearts, is something Jews don’t do. And thus the communal al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha.

On this day we don’t have to hold it inside any longer and after the gates close tonight our transgressions will no longer have to consume us.

True atonement comes when our shame moves us beyond the darkness toward actual change. If shame brings no change, then the shame is useless. And if changing our ways doesn’t bring about and end to the shaming, it is a personal disaster.

In Judaism our sins are neither original nor are they eternal. I think this may be connected with the Jewish tattoo taboo. People change. Why would you label yourself eternally on a momentary whim?

I have often marveled at the fact that right next to the only kosher restaurant in town, on Minnetonka Boulevard, there is a tattoo removal parlor. Like if you want that Knish, you’re gonna have to get that thing taken off.

Hester Prynne’s scarlet A sewn upon her dress was removable. The padlocked pillory of the stocks is at some point to be opened. But shaming that never goes away? Deeds for which we have atoned but threaten to live on for eternity? Honest self-assessment that becomes the judgment of thousands, maybe even millions of pairs of eyes that can never get enough of shining the lamp of shame on someone other than themselves?

I sometimes wonder if William Faulkner foresaw this period of human history when he said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.”

This is not the Jewish way. Yom Kippur calls upon us to acknowledge that what is done is done. Yes, our actions of this last year, whether immortalized on line, or emblazoned on the cranial hard drives of our friends and loved ones, are out there. But contrary to the endless hell that the web seems to fix upon people who have erred and been called on it by “holier than thou” eyes in cyber space, Yom Kippur proposes a conclusion. The gates really will close this evening. There is, for all of us, a very real opportunity to start over.

In Judaism our sins are neither original nor are they eternal. The consequences of our behavior have always had the potential to be painful, but the atonement was never meant to be forever. We are meant to make mistakes, over and over perhaps, but to learn from them and to grow. My office overlooks our Early Childhood Center and in between appointments and preparations for events such as this I will occasionally go over to the window and watch the kids. The other day as I was watching them I was reminded of the story of the Chassidic Jew who once asked his rebbe this question: “Why bother praying for forgiveness on Yom Kippur, he said, when inevitably we know we will sin again?”

In response the rebbe asked him to look out the window behind him. He did so and saw that outside was a toddler learning to walk. "What do you see?" asked his rebbe. "Well, I see a child, standing and falling," replied the disciple. Day after day the Chassid returned to witness the same scene. But at the week's end, the child stood and didn't fall. And in that moment the observer saw in the child's eyes that unique expression of the achievement of having attained the impossible. "So it is with us," said the rebbe. "We may fail again and again, but in the end, a loving God gives us the opportunities we need to succeed." L’shana tova.

Yom Kippur: Mental Health

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2014/5775

“Gooooooood morning, Vietnam! It’s 0600 hours. What does the ‘O’ stand for? O my God, it’s early!” – Adrian, Good Morning, Vietnam

“You’re not perfect, sport, and let me save you the suspense: this girl you’ve met, she’s not perfect either. But the question is whether or not you’re perfect for each other.” - Good Will Hunting

“You treat a disease, you win, you lose. You treat a person, I guarantee you, you'll win, no matter what the outcome.” - Patch Adams

“Carpe Diem, seize the day. Make your lives extraordinary” - Dead Poets Society

When I learned that Robin Williams had died I was heartbroken. The world had lost a funny, brilliant and kind man who shared his talents and his resources with all of us. Upon hearing the news I must admit I thought it was a joke. TMZ was pulling a prank on social media. When I realized it was true, I thought it was from an accident, or maybe he died suddenly of a heart attack. I later learned that was not the case at all. Robin Williams died from a terrible illness that affects millions of Americans. It does not discriminate by age, gender, sexual orientation or economic status. He died from something that no one likes to talk about because of the social stigma associated with it. People avoid the subject, whisper about those who suffer from it, turn their backs and walk away. Robin Williams died from depression.

Even his life circumstances could not protect him. One sufferer described depression as: “having nothing to do with who you are, how much you earn, how popular or famous you are, unpopular or unknown you are, it just is. Like cancer is. Like asthma is. Like diabetes is. Some people get it, some people don’t. It is an illness and it must be viewed and treated as such.”

We must end the stigma. It is becoming so detrimental to our society that just the other day I heard a commercial on cities 97 asking the community to fight against the stigma. The ad was sponsored by the “Make it OK campaign”, a new effort being piloted right here in Minnesota to end the silence around mental illness. This is a step in the right direction but the mission is difficult. We live in a society that tells us to be happy all of the time. All we have to do is log on to facebook to witness this point of view. The self-selecting “shares” of our friends and family reinforces the idea that everyone else is enjoying an enviable vacation, job promotion, engagement, or anniversary with a doting spouse. It is natural to only want to share what is extraordinary and exciting in our lives, but it gives the perception of perfection rather than the reality that our lives are wonderfully messy and complicated. It is no wonder that individuals and families feel they need to keep their depression a secret. The message is they are the only ones who are struggling.

The media, magazine covers, and news stories convey the message that only the poor, the homeless, the unsuccessful struggle with their mental health. Only the perfect can compete in our society. Everyone else fails. All one has to do is look at fashion or teen magazines to see that pop-culture sells an impossible ideal. A person must be perfectly thin, perfectly tall, and perfectly muscular. 

So many of our high schoolers, and now those in middle and grade school feel they must play an instrument perfectly and speak a foreign language perfectly and get perfect grades in order to be accepted to an elite university. If they don’t do all of this then the rest of their life is doomed to failure. Depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, anorexia – these do not fit into the unrealistic stereotypes of what makes a person thrive and happy. Yet, everywhere we look there are remarkable people who do not fit this mold. All the accomplished people I know have struggled. These are not always the stories published, the anecdotes told, but they always exist and frequently form the basis for success. Yet, somehow, we think that facing turmoil is the exception rather than the rule. We forget that Steve Jobs never graduated from college that Jim Carey suffered from depression, that Ashley Judd overcame an eating disorder, and that as a teenager, Wynona Ryder suffered from panic attacks.

Let us seize this day and say to each other it is enough – enough of asking people to hide, enough of asking them to keep secrets, enough of our loved ones bearing this burden alone. It is time for us to end the stigma of depression that is ingrained in our culture. It is time for us to stop making unwarranted assumptions about those who struggle with their mental health. We must stop assigning blame, we must stop underestimating others abilities. We must do this for the rising number of teens who attempt suicide every year. We must do this for our parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends whom we love so much.

Our tradition can help us change the conversation for in it we find great leaders who suffered from depression. King Solomon, known for his wisdom and justice, was one of these leaders. The rabbis teach that:

One day Solomon asked his most trusted minister to find a ring that upon looking at it would make a happy man sad and a sad man happy. Spring passed and then summer and the trusted minister had no idea where he could find the ring. Finally, he decided to take a walk in one of the poorest quarters of Jerusalem. He passed by a merchant who had begun to set out the day's wares on a shabby carpet. "Have you by any chance heard of a special ring that makes the happy wearer forget his joy and the broken-hearted wearer forget his sorrows?" He watched the elderly man take a plain gold ring from his carpet and engrave something on it. When the minister read the words on the ring, his face broke out in a wide smile.

The Minister returned to King Solomon. "Well, my friend, have you found the ring?"

The minister held up a small gold ring and declared, "Here it is, your majesty!" The jeweler had written three Hebrew letters on the gold band: Gimel, Zayin, Yud, which begin the words "Gam zeh ya'avor - This too shall pass."

You see, even the king needed a reminder that he could overcome his depressive episode and that through the good times and the hard times, when he was successful and when he stumbled, he was a valuable and worthy leader. If God did not deem depression to be an inhibitor of King Solomon’s leadership abilities, who are we to judge?

Our tradition is full of strong, powerful, extraordinary leaders who face personal challenges. Judaism does not ask us to be perfect or hide ourselves. In fact, it does quite the opposite. It asks us to confront ourselves. It understands that individuals have many struggles in life, and that this only adds to their character. In a few weeks we will read from the Torah portion Vayetzeh where Jacob wrestles. No one is quite sure with whom Jacob wrestles. The text is ambiguous. There are many explanations. One explanation that resonates with me is that Jacob wrestles with himself, with his past self, with his demons, with the actions he has taken that haunt him. He is forced to uncover all of his secrets. The ones he has kept from others and the ones he has kept from himself. In the end his struggle brings him blessing. Jacob confronts his fears and wins. For this he is given the name Israel and an entire nation is named after him. Not only is he given a blessing, he becomes a blessing, but this comes at a cost. Jacob leaves this encounter with a limp he has forever. It is his reminder that through our struggle and our pain we can encourage ourselves and each other to lead more fulfilling, more engaging and more meaningful lives.

Not one of us will make it through life unscathed. We will have to confront challenges. They may be financial or relational, they may be academic or health related; some will endure abuse or addiction. Confronting these alone only makes the burden that much heavier. Hiding our struggles leaves us depleted of energy and hinders our ability to recover. When we acknowledge our hardships we find others who can help us, support us, and understand what we are facing. We can work together to create spaces where it is safe to discuss our feelings, to uncover our vulnerabilities, to reveal our complex selves. We are able to allow one another to be the imperfect wonderful human beings we are. Only when we talk and discuss, educate and examine, will we be able to end the stigma associated with depression.

This is possible for us to accomplish. We have been able to de-stigmatize other issues in our community. Remember when one could not be openly gay in Minneapolis? Remember when cancer was spoken about in a hushed voice, with people seemingly afraid they might catch it if they talked too loud? Remember when people thought you could contract HIV from sharing silverware? 

Through conversation and education we were able to reverse these notions. Today there are support groups for those fighting cancer and their caretakers, gay marriage is legal in our state and we understand and are able to treat and prevent HIV. Depression is also an illness and we must acknowledge this in order to help our community, our children. When we confront mental illness as we confront cancer and diabetes and heart disease, we affirm that all people are valuable. By ending this harmful stigma we make our community live its Jewish values of betzelem eloheim – everyone is created in God’s image!

A defining text on Yom Kippur is from the Torah portion Nitzavim. God sets before the people life and death: “This day, I call upon the heaven and the earth as witnesses: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. You shall choose life, so that you and your offspring will live.” As long as we whisper we tell others that depression is a curse and we are inhibiting their ability to live. We must end this detrimental behavior. We must choose life, for ourselves, and future generations by fighting the battle that will bring healing. We must speak frankly, openly and honestly. Only in this way can we help end the stigma that causes so much shame. Only in this way will everyone have the support to fight this illness. Only in this way can we be sure that everyone is given the opportunity to be a blessing in life. For, as Robin Williams character said in Hook, “To live, to live would be an awfully big adventure.”

Yom Kippur: Woe Is Not Us

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2013/5774

A recent poll was taken asking which holidays Jews like best. It indicated that Hanukkah is far more popular with younger Jews than Yom Kippur. Really? I mean, come on kids, what’s not to like about the big Kippur? You got your fasting, staying in Temple all day, having to say you’re sorry for a billion things you messed up on? You like Hanukkah better? With the chocolate gelt, potato latkes, dreidl games and presents every night? Come on! Yom Kippur’s the bomb! I guess it could have been worse. They might have said Christmas…

OK, so Yom Kippur is kind of a bummer. But it is designed that way. And here’s the thing. The power of Yom Kippur relies on the fact that Jews are able to know the difference between a downer day and the other days of the year. To be Jewish is to master the art of distinguishing moments to dwell on our suffering and moments to focus on choosing life and living. As the biblical book of Ecclesiastes famously tells us: there is a time to laugh and a time to cry.

We Jews are a people of extremes. Chaim Weitzman, the first president of Israel, once said: The Jewish people are like everyone else, only more so. When we kvetch, nobody kvetches better. It has been asked, why are there so few Jewish alcoholics? Answer: Because it interferes with our suffering.

And when we party we really party. Mark and I recently played for an orthodox wedding that was totally wild. Jugglers, magicians and fire-eaters entertained the bride and groom. We did a 45 minute non-stop hora. The party got so crazy men and women almost started dancing together.

That same book of Ecclesiastes teaches us that although life is short and filled with frustration, we should eat drink and be merry, for what else is there? I always think of the Jewish couple in the restaurant who are overheard saying: “ach, the food here is terrible… and such small portions!”

We are a people constantly aware of the ups and downs of life. Consider the tale of Yankele the traveler who orders a pair of pants from the Jewish tailor. When he has to leave town the pants are not yet ready. Seven years later he returns and finally the tailor delivers. Yankele says: “God made the world in seven days, yet you take seven years to make a pair of pants.” “Ah yes, but look at the world,” says the tailor, “and look at my trousers!”

In my 25 years as a rabbi I have been asked many times: how do you go from those wonderful joyous moments to the sad ones and back again often right on the same day? My answer is typically Jewish. I answer with another question: I don’t know, how do you do it? We all do it… Take Yossel the carpenter who informed the funeral director: “my wife has died, and I wish to make arrangements for her burial.” “But how can that be?” asked the funeral director. “We buried your wife two years ago.” “Oh, that was my first wife,” said Yossel, “and now my second wife, too, has died.” “Pardon me,” said the funeral director, “I didn’t know you had remarried. Mazel tov!” I’m proud of the fact that although the Jewish people know suffering better than anyone on the planet, we’re still the funniest people on the planet. What’s that about? How could such a thing have happened? Theories abound. One is that humor is the way Jewish people take risks. Generally speaking we’re not your bungee jumpers or regular contestants on Jackass. And with certain notable examples we are pretty fiscally conservative.

Jewish humor has always been a risk taking humor, tempting fate. I know this first hand. Though it isn’t my day job, thanks God, I have tried my hand at stand up and have gotten myself into some trouble doing it often at totally inappropriate times... like on Yom Kippur the most solemn day of the year.

I feel like it is part of my own pathos, my own sense of sad family history, holocaust roots, Jewish neurosis guilt and anxiety that fuels my need to try some risky humor.

For example, speaking at the Tennebrae service at our large Roman Catholic neighbors down the street a few years ago I referred to it as the Basilica of St. Miriam. I was the only Jew in the room with two thousand Catholics celebrating the crucifixion, death and resurrection of their lord Jesus, (which for most of Christian history was blamed on us) and passing a giant life size cross over their heads distinctly in my direction. Talk about conspicuous. I got up to speak and said that I felt like a matzoh ball in a bowl of clam chowder.

There is something just so Jewishly appealing about goofing around with people who take themselves too seriously.

Yes, I’m the rabbi who used my dog Flora as a subject for a High holiday sermon. It’s the one sermon people remember. “rabbi I remember that sermon you gave about your dog.” And yes, I’m the rabbi who brought our former dog Sophie up onto the bima one Purim to show off how she would refuse to eat a dog treat if I said it was treif. She’d turn her head away with disdain. Then I’d say “kosher” and she’d gobble it up. She even knew how to play dead – Sophie! Hodroff! Now there was a yiddisha pup. canine a hora.

Why do we do things like that? I can only say from my own experience that the deeper the pain and sadness that lies within my heart the more titillating it is to risk it with some mischievous humor. I’m hardly the first one to figure that out. Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, the Marx Brothers, John Stewart, Jerry Seinfeld, Mort Sahl, Joan Rivers, Larry David, Don Rickles, Mel Brooks, Jackie Mason, Rodney Dangerfield. In 1975 it was estimated that more than two thirds of the working comics in the world were Jewish. The Jewish people are experts both in despair and unbridled joy. So we need to set specific times for appropriate solemnity so that we aren’t always wallowing in despair.

There is a lot of “woe” out there. You get a lot of street cred these days when you can prove you’ve overcome terrible circumstances to get where you are. This country likes to dwell on suffering 24/7. You watch American Idol and it is hard to determine what gets the votes, the talent or the sad story that proves the contestant overcame incredible hurdles to get there. Suffering is still very hip. People today try to score bonus points by revealing the suffering in their past. The contest shows on TV are not just about talent – they are often about who has suffered the most. Never mind my singing, let me tell you about my stint in rehab! Before I begin my number, can I just tell you that my great grandmother, the moment she came to the new world died the moment she set foot on Ellis Island.

Maybe the show should be called America’s Got Tsurus. It’s almost as though if you haven’t got a tragic story to tell your work isn’t relevant.

This is nothing new. Suffering has always been entertaining. Some of you are old enough to remember the television show Queen for a Day, in which the housewife with the most woeful story got crowned. Each contestant had to talk publicly about the recent financial and emotional hard times she had been through. Her need for medical care or a child with an illness, or a husband out of work. The harsher the story the higher the applause meter would read. The winner would be draped in a velvet robe, given a glittering jeweled crown to wear, placed on a velvet-upholstered throne, and handed a dozen longstemmed roses to hold as she wept, often uncontrollably, while her list of prizes was announced.

Times haven’t changed all that much. Candidates running for office trumpet their humble beginnings with far more passion than their track record as a public servant. From the days of honest Abe’s log cabin to Bill Clinton’s single parenting to Marco Rubio’s immigrant parents to Elizabeth Warren’s waiting tables at 13 years old to a host of health struggles, alcoholism and drug addictions.

It isn’t enough to have talent or been a suitable public servant. You have to have gone through hell!

One of biggest problems with being constantly confronted with suffering is that we become inured to it. Hardened. Insensitive. And we lose respect for suffering. As unpopular a notion as this might be to hear, suffering, like everything else in this world, has a purpose, and for many, the purpose is learning – achieving gratitude for the beauty of life, for when the pain ceases and we can breathe easily again.

But to use suffering as a badge of honor is not really the Jewish way, and thus we tell jokes about it. One that comes to mind is the Jewish woman who halts the city bus between stops and bangs on the door. “oy” she says, clutching her chest, “if you knew what I have you’d let me on the bus” so the driver lets her on. She moves back and sees a seat she wants and says to the person sitting there “oy, if you knew what I have, you’d let me have that seat.” Of course she gets the seat. She hits the buzzer to have the bus stop right in front of her apartment. “oy, if you knew what I have you’d let me off here at my home.” Fine, says the driver, and as she steps down he asks her – by the way, lady, what exactly is it that you have?” and she replies “chutzpah”.

There are plenty of sad days on the Jewish calendar. Yahrzeits are sad. Funerals of course are sad. But in our brand of faith, joy trumps sadness. It kind of has to. Tisha B’Av marks the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem and numerous other tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people. We sit on the floor as mourners and in dim light chant the book of Lamentations… Except when it falls on Shabbat no overt mourning is allowed. Even today, Shabbat lightens our Yom Kippur load.

The Talmud instructs us that when a funeral procession and a wedding procession meet at a crossroads, the funeral stops and waits for the wedding to pass. As the Torah portion we just heard says, when faced with blessing and curse we are to choose life. We are taught that one must opt for life and wholeness, before one can adequately confront death and brokenness.

The Latin word for suffering passionem is related to our English word passion, which obviously is related to the word compassion. The real opposite of suffering, then, is not joy, but apathy. Indifference. Suffering and relating to suffering ultimately should lead to our being more compassionate. But you can’t relate honestly to suffering when it is thrown in your face every moment. Suffering is very sacred and should be treated as such. The only way to do that is to celebrate and commemorate both extremes of living.

Wise sages in many different traditions including our own tell us that suffering brings clarity, illumination; for the Buddha, suffering was the first rule of life, and much of it comes from our own wrongheadedness — our cherishing of self. The world’s great religions will teach us that we have the cure for much of our suffering within us. I believe that a sense of humor is a huge part of that cure.

After the terrible Japanese Tsunami in 2011 the Dalai Lama visited a fishing village that had been decimated. Schools and homes were now reduced to rubble. Many had been killed. Thousands of Japanese turned out to welcome him, including a group of orphaned children. There was little he could do to comfort them considering the horrible losses they had endured. Still, he told them to change their hearts from sufferers to helpers and somehow find the strength to turn the bitterness into hope. He gave hugs and held hands. He smiled. And yes, he cried.

So why, with the uniquely significant Jewish history of suffering, have Jews emerged as such a funny people? My theory is a Kabbalistic one. Jewish Mysticism teaches that God’s reason for creation is that there be someone for God to have a relationship with us, and the primary reason for that relationship is to bestow goodness and happiness. Our job is to accept it. Humor is God’s blessing and it is instilled within us as an antidote to suffering. Why else would laughter feel so good? But the distinctiveness of this Yom Kippur day is the proof that we cannot live a life of constant woe. If we did, this holiday would mean nothing and true suffering have no meaning. It is precisely because we have this innate heart of joy that we are able to turn one full day a year over to serious introspection. But if all we dwell on is the darkness, we won’t know what to do when tragedy or loss strikes.

But there is and always will be suffering. A problem of Jewish theology has always been that if God is a just and perfect God who created this world, it ought to be perfect. But it isn’t. It’s a mess. The Jew has three options – to despair, to repair it, or to laugh at it. With over 2000 years plus of tsurus behind us option #1, despair is out of the question, so we opt for fixing and shticking. Joking, provoking and hoping. In this way we perform the ultimate duty of humankind – to accept God’s goodness in one of its most delicious forms – humor.

May you be inscribed for blessing on this Yom Kippur day for a year of life and laughter, of hoping and coping and being fully human. L’shana tova

Yom Kippur: The Choices We Make

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2013/5774

I am directionally impaired. When I lived in New York City, without fail, every time, that I got out at a new subway stop I went in the wrong direction. Even when I tried to anticipate that my instinct was to go the wrong way, and go the other way, I still ended up going the wrong way. Imagine then, the sinking feeling of dread in my stomach when I first moved to Minneapolis and found myself driving north on 35W. I immediately called my father to tell him that there was no way I was ever going to find my way around this city. I was driving NORTH on 35W!!!

Now, most of you are probably thinking - Rabbi Gertman just get a GPS. I have one, and when I follow it, it is wonderful, but I have also learned that I am much better at listening to people than to machines! I often make a wrong turn, miss an exit, or just completely ignore my GPS. It is something I am working on. At times I also make the decision not to use my GPS. I think that I know where I am going, or I am to lazy to plug in all of the information, or I am too impatient to wait for the information to load. I make a choice and I live with the consequences. Often times the it is an unplanned detour. In this I have found reward and punishment. Finding a new way to go somewhere, learning that I actually know the city better than the GPS, discovering shortcuts are all positive outcomes of deciding not to garner help on directions. Being late for a meeting, missing a performance or leaving a friend to wait are all negative consequences of these poor decisions. And they are damaging, trust me I have experienced all of them!

We have so many choices to make in our lives. This is both a blessing and a curse. Personally, I was able to choose the college I wanted to attend, the country where I wanted to study abroad, the city I wanted to live in after graduation, the profession I wanted to pursue. When I was ordained I was able to take the job that was the best fit regardless of the location. In my personal life I can choose to date or not to date, I can choose whether or not to get married and if I want to have children. I can choose to be vegan or vegetarian, to eat only organic or only unprocessed foods that are not GMO. At the grocery store there are endless options for everything I want to buy from toothpaste to shampoo to nut mixes. We are very lucky to have all of these choices, but they could drive a person crazy. I think that often times the abundance of decisions we must make every day heightens our anxiety.

I am a bit of a perfectionist and I am fairly risk averse. I spend much time and energy analyzing my decisions, weighing the negatives and the positives, trying to foresee the outcome. I hate the thought of making the wrong choice. Yet, so often there is not a clear right choice. It is not possible for me to make a decision with the utmost certainty that it will have the best possible outcome. I am amazed by how I do not know what decisions to make for myself, but the “experts” have decided they do. In popular magazine articles, newspaper op-eds, television panels, and social media, we are bombarded with their opinions. These “experts” tell us exactly what we should do in almost any given situation. They also let us know that if we take an alternative path, we are going to ruin our lives. We are told to eat local, no eat organic, no eat only what you can find that is both local and organic. Get married young and have children right away, it is healthier for the mother and the baby. No, wait to have children; children with older parents are more successful. Fathers need to take more vacation, spend more time with their children. No, they need to work harder and make more money so that their wives can stay at home. Same sex marriages are going to ruin children. No, as long as there are two loving parents in a home it does not matter what their gender is. Two parents are better than one parent, but if a woman wants to have children and is unmarried she should have one on her own. This will make it impossible for her to ever get married. No, this will make her more respected; she had the courage to pursue her dreams.

The opinions on whether and how a woman should work are endless. Sheryl Sandberg, CFO of Facebook said that women need to sit at the table. Women must aspire to climb the corporate ladder and the men at the top are obligated to support and actively encourage them. In reaction, journalist Vanessa Garcia came out encouraging women not to lean in, but to stand up straight. She argues that leaning in is the same as giving in to the male controlled business culture. Then, Deborah Spar, the president of Barnard College in New York City told all women everywhere that the only women who ever had it all are fictional, found on TV and in movies. She reminds us that "Every woman, every person, at the top makes trade-offs".

However, we want the options without the trade-offs. We want to be able to have and do it all and we are so afraid that we will miss out that we become paralyzed by the plethora of choices. There is even a term for this - FOMO - fear of missing out. Most of us have it. It is the reason we check facebook every five minutes, and yes I do this also, to make sure the choice we did make did not cause us to miss out on the most fun, most exciting, most meaningful event of our lives. It has become such a problem that there is an abundance of articles on how to deal with this issue: 3 Strategies To Beat Your Fear Of Missing Out; 4 Ways To Combat Midlife FOMO; How To Handle FOMO At The Office. We need others to tell us how to relax and enjoy the choices we have made. Not only do we want a guarantee that what we are doing is right for our future, we also want to know that our actions are the best for right now. We want to know we are raising our children correctly, that we are treating our partners well, and that we are good at our jobs. We post incessantly on facebook so that we get the immediate gratification of knowing that what we are doing is worthwhile.

Of all the books and articles I have read my favorite is: “Why the woman who has it all Does Not Exist”. In it Deborah Spar reminds her readers: “Wonder Woman doesn't exist. She is fiction, and you are real. Building a life on fantasy is never a good thing. Just because we are told we can do it all, does not mean that we should”. In truth, we can’t do it all, we can’t have it all and we can’t be whatever we want. Sorry, our parents sold us a bill of goods on that one. I am talking about all of us here, not just woman. I am never going to be a cartographer or a great musician for that matter. I learned that when I tried to play cello. My bow would be going up when the notes were going down and it would be going down when the notes were going up. I made a choice and it was a bad choice. It was a decision that caused me to have to carry a large and heavy instrument to and from school on a regular basis, it caused my parents’ ears to suffer and it caused me quite a lot of frustration, but in the end I learned a great deal from my mistake. I learned that I am physically stronger and mentally more determined than I had thought. I learned that I could handle bad orchestra teachers and having to do something I hated. I also learned that I would not be pursuing a musical career. It was a bad decision but I learned more from it then if I had decided not to play an instrument at all.

Another bad decision that I think we can all relate to is one in the realm of dating. How many of us have dated the absolute wrong person. We have ignored all of the advice of the people around us because we were sure that we could make it work with this person. These can be the relationships from which we learn the most. We find our true selves, what we want from another person, and our resilience. They often lead us to find the right person.

We need to stop being afraid of the negatives, of the possibility that we might choose incorrectly, we might fail, we might close the wrong door, make an irreversible decision. Whatever decision we make, we will learn from its outcome. We will grow from its consequences. All we need to do is look to the Israelites to understand this. A trip that should have only taken them weeks took them 40 years. And no, it was not because Moses could not follow directions. It was because they had a lot to learn. They did not know how to be free. They did not know how to govern themselves. They had no understanding of how to interact as a community. They learned all of these lessons while wandering in the desert. They learned them in the midst of making very bad decisions. Remember the golden calf! The Israelites engaged in idol worship. They broke one of the Ten Commandments. Still they were forgiven.

We are still enslaved and we are still learning. We are enslaved by the fear of not being perfect. We have the time and the lessons of these High Holidays to try to move ourselves farther from Egypt and closer to the Promised Land. Isaiah asks us in this morning’s Haftorah portion: “is this the fast I desire... A day for you to starve your body? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush And lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, A day when the Lord is favorable? No, this is the fast I desire: To untie the cords of the yoke. To let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke.” The prophet Isaiah is telling us that starving ourselves and flogging ourselves does not fulfill the intention of the fast. These things are for show, they make us look like we are repenting, like we are changing, but they do nothing to transform us. This is not how we improve ourselves or our world. Rather, we show that we are taking the commandment seriously when we alter our actions so they help others and ourselves.

Isaiah wants us to free the captive. Each one of us is captive to something. For many of us the master is the plethora of choices we have to make and the unsolicited advice on how to make them. These have paralyzed us; they have wrought us incapable of moving forward. We are enslaved by the tyranny of seemingly relevant choices that all play on a fear we have. We are afraid of being different, not being liked, of not being attractive and of missing out. We worry that we will be unsuccessful, that we will fail. No decision is easy and there are no grantees that any decision is the correct one. One thing I can grantee is that we will all miss out on something we consider to be important and we will all fail at some point. That is the privilege and the burden of having many opportunities. It is the price for being a human being and it is what Yom Kippur is all about. Yom Kippur allows us to be human, flaws and all. It shows us that we can recover from our mistakes. Some of our mistakes are harmless and even beneficial. They teach us without hurting anyone or anything. Other mistakes require more work to mend. They require confronting loved ones we have offended or co-workers we have hurt. Even when we did not mean to cause pain or destruction, we are commanded to acknowledge the impact of our behavior in order to truly correct our actions.

Yom Kippur helps us to progress from a place of pain and foible to one of growth and maturity. All choices, good and bad, have the potential to move us forward. Hopefully this knowledge will free each of us to make the best decision possible with the information provided and then enjoy where it takes us. As we go into this New Year may we be renewed in our capacity to learn and grow. May we be able to step forward rather than stand paralyzed. As the former New York Yankee and oft quoted cultural philosopher Yogi Berra said: “When you come to a fork in the road --- take it”! It may just lead someplace wonderful!

Yom Kippur: Being a Proud Reform Jew

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2012/5773

Recently a blog post circulated among reform rabbis [1]. The article surprised and appalled many of us. Written by Rabbi Berg Wein, an orthodox rabbi, the article begins: “The modern liberal Jew has redefined Judaism according to his or her wants and fashion. The modern liberal Jew cares more about their child attending an Ivy League school then having a Jewish education, is ashamed of Israel and abhors tribal loyalties”. The rabbi goes on to say: “As long as attending Harvard or Yale is more important to Jewish parents than giving their children a basic Jewish education and the ephemeral pursuit of utopian world justice is more important than Shabbat or marrying a Jew then the disappearance of large swaths of American Jewry is guaranteed”.

This is quite the criticism of modern liberal Judaism! Wein is not alone in his critique. A professor of mine at the Hebrew Union College, Steven M. Cohen, writes and teaches that intermarriage will bring about the end of Judaism [2]. This he told to a class of 25 rabbinical students, 20% of whom were born into intermarried families. Wein and Cohen are only representing half of the picture! They are not in this synagogue, and they do not see what I see every day.

Rabbi Wein accuses us of being ashamed of Israel. We are not ashamed of Israel. We, especially those of us under 35, ask different questions than previous generations. This does not however mean that our connection has weakened. Almost half of last year’s confirmation class chose to spend an extended amount of time in Israel and Temple Israel sends a full congregational trip to Israel every year. I have spoken with people in their 20s and 30s so eager to take a trip to Israel they have opened savings accounts to make this a reality. In addition, programs on Israel fill our auditorium!

We are accused of living Judaism in a way that is unsustainable. I find this difficult to believe when 16 and 17 year old students ask to continue their Jewish education past confirmation. With sports and exams, extracurricular activities and homework, they still want to commit time to learning and being together in the synagogue, when we engage them in real relationship and meet them where they are at.

I believe that Jewish families want to make a commitment to Judaism when we have great interest in our pilot program, Judaism in Real Time. This program asks families to commit time to learning, studying and practicing Judaism together, in their homes and the synagogue. On Rosh Hashanah afternoon we gathered together to eat apples and hone, sing songs and discuss the lessons of this season. Instead of parents dropping their children off at religious school or Hebrew school and continuing on with their day, Jewish learning becomes a family endeavor. These are families committed to living the Jewish calendar, not changing it to fit their needs.

I believe in the power of Reform Jewish theology when conversion students sit in my office and tell me that their attraction to Judaism came from our emphasis on education and tikkun olam. They tell me they love the fact that Judaism does not ask you to leave your analytical skills at the door when you enter the building. They feel empowered by the reform movement’s tag line “choice through knowledge”. This lets them know that they will be able to live a Jewish life that makes sense to them within the context of the modern world. The pursuit of world justice is not our weakness, but one of our greatest strengths. Isaiah tells the Israelites to be a “light unto the nations.” How can we possibly do this if we only interact with the Jewish community? One of the most famous quotes by Rabbi Hillel is: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? We live out our religious ideals and our desire to work for the good of the community when we work to improve the world. By actively supporting the Vote No campaign Temple Israel demonstrates to all the residents of Minnesota that as Jews we perceive that all people are created B’tzelim Eloheim, in the image of God. We express to all that we will not stand idly by as one group is discriminated against. Our confirmation students learn this lesson when they travel to the Religious Action Center in Washington D.C. and meet our congressional representative and senators to make their cases for or against issues about which they are passionate. Last year 100% of our class attended this trip and it looks like we will be close to the same this year. These are students who understand that their Judaism is about both civic and religious responsibility.

If there is anything that the High Holy Days teach us, it is that life is complicated and messy! Judaism sets out black and white principles of right and wrong, but we live in the grey area between them. We want to come to Temple on Yom Kippur, but we don’t really understand why we can’t break our fast with eggs and bacon. We love and support Israel and we want to visit, but we also want to go to Spain, Italy and France. We want to fall in love with who we fall in love with, but we want to marry them under a chuppah and break a glass. We think peace will come in the Middle East, but we are afraid that it might not. Student Andrew Lustig insightfully and elegantly describes our complex, ambivalent, passionate identification in his spoken word poem posted on you tube [3]. He tells the viewer: 

“I am the Jewish star tattooed on the chest of the Jewish teenager who chooses to rebel against his parents and grandparents warnings of a lonely goyim cemetery by embracing that same Judaism and making permanent my Jewish identity.” “I am a concept foreign to the rest of the world, I am not Judaism I am sleep away camp.” “I am your grandmother who has seen Auschwitz and Berkenow, who has seen 49, 67 and 73; who is tired of trying to make peace with those people who just want to blow up buses and destroy her people. I am the 19 yr old who has seen Budress, Waltz with Bashir and Don’t mess with the Zohan and who thinks, who knows, peace is possible. I am the complicated reason you take the cheese off the burger you eat at the Saturday morning tailgate. I am never asked if I have horns or a pot of gold, if I rule the world or killed Jesus. I am asked where my black hat is, if I really get 8 presents on my Christmas, why my side burns aren’t long and if I really have never tasted pork. I am asked what a gefilta fish is, I say I don’t know, I don’t like it, nobody does, but we eat it anyway”.

“I am on JDate and not match.com because well it is just easier that way. I am your Hebrew name, your Israeli cousins, your torah portion, your 13 candles, your bat mitzvah dress and the cute Israeli soldier on your birthright bus. I am 18 when I discover that Israel is not actually a Garden of Eden, of milk and honey where Jews of all backgrounds come together eternally grateful to do a hora in the streets. I am still confident that it will be. I am the way your stomach forgets to be hungry and your lungs forget to breathe when the rabbi commands the final tekiah gedolah and the entire congregation, the congregation that is not a synagogue but an entire people listening to the call of the ram’s horn. I am Jewish.” [3]  

Many of us can relate to something in this poem. This spoken word piece was posted on YouTube on January 11th, 2012 and has had over 250,000 hits. The video has been posted on websites and blogs. It speaks to Jews because it highlights the contradictions and struggles with which we all live. Judaism is a religion but also a culture, it is about community but also the individual, it is a legal system but also a system of belief. It is particularistic, defining Jews as God’s chosen people, but also universalistic with an understanding that all human beings are needed to make the world a fair and just place. It is a religion that is over 5,000 years old yet it is still relevant. It is always the same yet ever changing and right now we are in a period of great change. As Rabbi Zimmerman spoke about on Erev Rosh Hashanah, the world is changing quickly around us and as Jews we must decide if we will change with it or become irrelevant.

Judaism has a great tradition of change. “Rabbi Moses Isserles the great author of the preeminent code of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch, enunciated the principle of “Ha-idana – the present time” in his own legal writings. This principle holds that if contemporary sociological conditions and philosophical understandings have changed from what they were in earlier epochs, then adaptations and changes in customs and practices are permitted and even required. Rabbi Isserles teaches us that Judaism’s views change and adaptation is part of our heritage, even as our people continue to find rootedness and celebrate the sense of community that derives from the traditions that we have inherited.” [4] Moses, a Jew may have been given the Torah for the Israelites, but Adam, a human, was given dominion over all the earth. We are the inheritors of both of these gifts. We are Jewish. We feel it in our bodies and souls. But, we are also human beings and we want to be as much a part of the world community as we are a part of our Jewish community. Many clergy reacted defensively to much of Rabbi Wein’s article. But, when we took a step back, we realized the article had some valid points. The article brings to light truths that we must take into consideration if we are to truly understand ourselves and others perception of us, even if it is hard to hear. Our commitment to Israel may seem as if it is waning when families choose to send their teenager on a summer experience to an obscure part of the world rather than Israel because they can go on Birthright for free. Birthright is an amazing and wonderful opportunity for students disconnected from Judaism. It gives them a chance to explore their Jewish roots and uncover their Jewish heritage. All too often it is used by people with strong Jewish upbringings who choose not to prioritize exploring their homeland.

We cannot ignore Wein’s statement that Judaism is in danger when parents do not prioritize Jewish education. We at Temple Israel can only teach the children who enter our classrooms, and you, the parents and grandparents are the only ones who can guarantee they will be there. I remember when I was in 6th grade. I, the child of a cantor and ordained rabbi, asked my mom if I could end religious school with my Bat Mitzvah. My mom looked at me and said: “I would never let you drop out of secular school at 13 what makes you think I would let you drop out of religious school at 13?” That, as they say, was the end of the discussion. With one sentence my mom taught me the importance of Jewish education.

The modern world gives us a choice. We can choose to be Jewish or we can choose to leave our heritage behind. We can choose to celebrate our Judaism only in our home and hide our faith outside, or we can live our Judaism wherever we are. These are difficult decisions for us to make because we feel so comfortable in the modern world. I mean, how can we possibly feel like outsiders when Jon Stewart proudly speaks about being Jewish and the Colbert Report does a bit on Rosh Hashanah? Yet, we still struggle with our choices. I know, because I have to make them also.

Temple Israel has been blessed with a wonderful female rabbi for 25 years. Our members are not surprised to see a rabbi in heels or wearing a dress or make-up. Even though there have been women in the rabbinate for over 30 years, in the popular imagination a rabbi is still an old man with a white beard and long payyos. I feel lucky to be able to be a rabbi in a congregation where I can truly be myself. You would be surprised by how many people in New York City were stunned to hear that I was in rabbinical school.

In a city with 1.5 million Jews one would think the average person would know what it means to be a rabbi, yet I would get some truly interesting questions and comments. My favorites were: “Is that like a nun?” and “Can rabbis get married?” I must be honest. I sometimes wondered if it was worth telling people that I was studying to become a rabbi. It would not be hard to give myself a new profession. Whereas here in Minneapolis it feels like every other person works for General Mills or Target, in New York, its finance. All I would have to do is say that I worked in finance, pick one of the five or six major firms, and the conversation would quickly turn to a new topic. It would be a fast and easy way to avoid what often became an awkward and intense conversation.

How do I know it would be so easy? I tried it a few times. I was curious. What would it feel like to hide my profession? How would the conversation flow without the look of shock, the quizzical expression, the fumbling with what to say next? How would I feel different if I did not have to explain to the person standing next to me that really I am a normal person?

Well, I can tell you now, it did not feel good. It was uncomfortable. It was a lie. I was not presenting my true self. The conversations went flat. It had nowhere to go because I was not being myself. I loved that I was studying to be a Rabbi and I am proud to be a Rabbi. Judaism is, and has always been, a big part of who I am. Judaism gives me direction in a complicated world. It is where I turn when I have big questions or small problems. Jewish holidays and rituals are what bring my family together. It is my moral compass, my guide when life becomes confusing.

I chose, consciously and purposefully, to commit to Reform Judaism. I did not pick a form of Judaism that is the easy way out, I did not pick Judaism for lazy Jews, I did not pick inauthentic, unsustainable Judaism. I did pick Judaism that is complicated and difficult because I believe in its message. I did pick Judaism that enhances life through ritual and tradition. I did pick Judaism that moves my soul and my spirit. I did pick Judaism that provides me with guideposts in a universe that is often hard to navigate.

Reform Judaism, liberal Judaism, is not perfect. Judaism is over 5000 years old while Reform Judaism is not even 200 years old. We still have to work to identify how we can best be Jewish in this ever spinning world. We do not even have a name that properly fits us. We are called– Reform, liberal – none are quite right. We need to continue to explore our relationship to each other, to Israel and to the wider community. We need to commit ourselves to Jewish learning and Jewish practice. We need to solidify our feelings of community. During this time of soul searching we need to examine the criticisms imposed on us and look into our communal selves to see if we have indeed missed the mark. Liberal Judaism has much to offer the Jewish and secular worlds. There is meaning we can garner and purpose we can uncover if we are willing to take the time to do so.

We will only gain as individuals and as a community when we strengthen or beliefs and our practice. I would like to end by adding my own versus to Andrew Lustig’s poem: “I am the proud Bat Mitzvah who leads Shabbat morning services for my community. I am the student who is sad to go on summer vacation because I will miss my religious school friends. I am the 20 something who attends Shabbat evening services and then goes to dinner with friends. I am the teenager who learns about my heritage while trekking through Israel with peers. I am wearing high heels, fashionable clothes and a kippah to lead services. I am what a modern rabbi looks like. I am how a modern Jew acts. I am proud.”

[1] http://www.rabbiwein.com/blog/post-1378.html

[2] http://www.jewishlife.org/pdf/steven_cohen_paper.pdf

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJe0uqVGZJA

[4] Rabbi David Ellison, HUC-JIR Chronicle 74