Erev Yom Kippur/Kol Nidre: Traditional Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2020/5781

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

Fast forward. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mazel Tov.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Traditional Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2020/5781

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Izzy: 

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

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

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

Shabbat shalom and shanah tovah.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Traditional Service

Sermon by Rabbi Zimmerman
2020/5781

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Izzy: 

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

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

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

Shabbat shalom and shanah tovah.

Erev Yom Kippur/Kol Nidre

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2019/5780

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2019/5780

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kol Nidre: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2018/5779

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s an incredible story of redemption.

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

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

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

That is the most precious thing on this earth.

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

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

Gmar Chatimah Tova.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2018/5779

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have many more stories like that. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what do we do?

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

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

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

Kol Nidre: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2017/5778

Written text of Rabbi Zimmerman's sermon is not available. Please enjoy the video of this Kol Nidre Sanctuary Service.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2017/5778

Written text of Rabbi Zimmerman's sermon is not available. Please enjoy the video of this Erev Rosh HaShanah Sanctuary Service.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2016/5777

Written text of Rabbi Zimmerman's sermon is not available. Please enjoy the video of this Erev Rosh HaShanah Sanctuary Service.

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.

Erev Yom Kippur: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2015/5776

There is no text for this sermon. Please enjoy the video of Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman on Erev Yom Kippur 2015/5776.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2015/5776

Written text of Rabbi Zimmerman's sermon is not available. Please enjoy the video of this Erev Rosh HaShanah Sanctuary Service.

Erev Yom Kippur: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Marcia Zimmerman
2014/5775

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There is no text for this sermon. Please enjoy this video of Rabbi Zimmerman on Erev Yom Kippur, 2014/5775.

Erev Yom Kippur: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2013/5774

There is no text for this sermon. Please enjoy the video of Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman on Erev Yom Kippur, 2013/5774.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2013/5774

There is no text for this sermon. Please enjoy the video of Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman on Erev Rosh HaShanah, 2013/5774.

Erev Yom Kippur: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2012/5773

The Kol Nidre Blessing and prayer is an act of contrition to say that we are sorry for the wrongs and sins – not that we have done last year – but that we will do this year. Historically, it is a prayer that was created during the Spanish Inquisition when Jews were made to say “yes” when they meant “no,” to convert to Christianity to save their lives. To say the Kol Nidre prayer was allowing them to observe Judaism in secret but in public having to have another identity.

Historically, it was a way for them to acknowledge that they know they would sin the minute they left that service. But really, there’s something eternal in that prayer, something about the future that’s really what I believe the Jewish people is all about, about leaving a legacy for the future, making the world better. That’s at the heart of the Kol Nidre prayer and blessing and service – we look to the future.

It’s interesting because I find that people are more focused on the here and now and actually are not looking beyond their own needs. We more often than not are like the woman who, in the airport, goes to buy a newspaper and a small package of cookies. She sits at the gate waiting for her plane to arrive and all of a sudden, she hears a rustling. A man in a nice suit is eating a cookie. He sits right behind her. He’s eating her cookie! She is outraged. So she takes one herself. Then what happens – she hears rustling again. “I can’t believe it“– she can’t even look at him, she’s so angry. So she takes another one. What’s worse – the last cookie – you know what he does? He breaks it in half, and sends half of it over to her. He gets up and he leaves. She’s just fuming, she’s playing in her mind what happened over and over and over again, and then, her plane arrives, her section is called, and she opens her purse to get out her boarding pass. And there is her unopened package of cookies.

Whose cookie is it? It seems as though we are taught from a very young age about whose cookie it is. Is it yours? No, it’s mine. It just doesn’t really leave a legacy, does it? It’s about the here and now where you don’t even notice what’s right in front of you. We seem to be so caught up in that.

For me, it really is about the text from the book of Joel that says “Your children will teach their children, and their children their children, and their children the generations after.” When you’re worrying about your cookie, you’re not looking to the world and to the future and what you want to leave behind. You’re looking at just what you want.

I think there are three ways for us to create a legacy. It’s to help us understand that wisdom and knowledge is truly important. I think in this day and age we really don’t need to teach our children how to make a living; they seem to do that pretty well. We’ve taught that really well. It’s how to make a life that’s meaningful – that we’ve missed a bit. That, I think, is about a legacy.

So the idea of Judaism being a deep well of wisdom is essential. Donniel Hartman was here from the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and he said we have focused so much on the death narrative, on the Holocaust in Israel, that our children think that is the only thing that’s Judaism – that is what we’ve fed them for all these years, and it just isn’t enough, it’s out of context. We have to teach them an entire Jewish history; we have to teach them what our sources say. We have to teach them how to be in the world and what Judaism has to teach.

You know that cookie story? Well, let’s look at what Judaism has to say about it.

A year and a half ago, the Cantor and I took a number of families to Israel and we participated in what’s call the Leket program. Leket is the four corners of a vineyard or a field that is not harvested by the person who is a steward of it. Rather, it’s left for the poor. We picked onions for an entire morning and learned about this program that actually also brings uneaten food from bar or bat mitzvah ceremonies, from weddings, from a b’rit milah or a naming to food shelves in Israel to feed the hungry so that the food isn’t thrown out. I talked to the Sisterhood about this program and they’re trying to start it here at Temple Israel. It’s telling us it’s not about your cookie or my cookie – actually, none of us own the cookie. In Judaism, God owns it all, and we are but stewards of what we have. It’s said in Judaism that if we don’t give tzedakah, guess what? We are like squatters, squatters on this earth because tzedakah, justice, and charity are our rent for being on this earth. Now that is something to talk about – that is a deep well of truth. About caring for each other rather than worrying if it’s our cookie.

Wisdom and knowledge lead to character building, and that is another legacy we leave to the future generations. You see, character is built by experience. You can have someone 17 who is incredibly wise and somebody who is 93 who hasn’t quite learned some lessons they need to learn. It’s not chronology – it really is experience. But it seems that we again have not allowed this generation to have the experiences that build character. I believe failure is the number one teacher of character. Each one of us in this sanctuary has failed at some point in our lives and that’s what’s gotten us to this point, because we learned a lot of great lessons.

Wendy Mogel says that everyone needs a bad fourth grade teacher, and everyone needs a shallow, promiscuous friend. (She says it a different way.) Because the lessons you learn from a bad teacher are lessons of life; lessons you learn from a bad friend (a friend your parents don’t approve of) are things you shouldn’t do in life. You learn that – those are good lessons. But we so quickly want to protect our children and we change the classroom or complain to the principal. If we want self-reliant children and adults then we can’t protect them – they have to learn the lessons of life.

And character – character builds convictions. A conviction is an essential part of who we are and is an essential part of a legacy we must leave. You see, today would have been my father’s 90th birthday. He died six years ago in the month of November. But today, he would have been 90. Here’s a man who I didn’t agree with on many fronts. We had extremely different political views but he taught me a lot about what it means to have convictions. He spent most of his life surrounded by women, and he was not afraid of his female side of things. He was a heart surgeon, but he was an artist, he was a gourmet cook, he was a connoisseur of fine wine. He taught me a lot about beauty and aesthetics, and he wasn’t afraid to make sure that we were fed the delicious delicacies that he created. He also was a man who reinvented himself many times.

He began as a surgeon; he was a surgeon in St. Louis and worked for the university there and was one of the first surgeons to do open heart surgery, beginning first on dogs as an experiment and then moving to humans. At 50 years old, he decided to retire from surgery because he never wanted to walk into an OR and have people whisper behind his back that he was too old to perform the surgery. He retired and went into preventative care. He was a part of Mr. Fit. I don’t know if you know about that, where they came up for the risk factors for cardiac care. The idea of controlling blood pressure, the idea of not smoking, of exercising, making sure that we could control our own risk factors and have a healthier life.

And when that was over, he didn’t want to become a burden to his medical practice so he went back to school and learned echocardiogram and did those, to keep patients coming to his practice. He also tried to sell his practice to the university, to teach young doctors how to talk to patients and it got this close – it was quite an innovative idea where he was actually going to have young medical students follow him as an apprentice program. At the last minute, it fell through and so he retired from his practice.

My father taught me about conviction. He would tell me, “Marcia, it doesn’t matter what you think. It matters that you think. Stand up for what you believe in, even if I disagree.” Today, on Yom Kippur I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror if I didn’t say something about the two amendments that will be on the ballot in November. What I can clearly say is that there should be no amendment to a constitution to limit people’s rights and responsibilities. Whatever one thinks, that is just wrong.

My father often would argue with me. He taught me how to debate; he taught me to debate the issues and not the people. In his memory today, as he would have turned 90, I just want to say that he really did die the way that he lived. He was hospitalized and my sisters told me to come home. I came back because he had decided he didn’t want any additional heroic measures. He had just finished dialysis, which he had been on for three years, and so we thought it would be a few days. He went back to his room and said, “You know what? I want everyone to go home, have dinner, go enjoy it, and then come back later tonight and we’ll talk.” We all went home. We were having dinner around the table where he often served us and fed us, in the home that he built for us – and we got a call that he had died. He died alone, and I believe he did so that he could always be the patriarch of the family, so we didn’t have to watch him. For him, that was important. (My mother, on the other hand, needed everybody there.)

So on his 90th birthday, I thank you for indulging me, helping me know that it really is about the legacy that each of us leaves that is essential to this world. We can take this day of Yom Kippur to look into that future and, like my father, kind of do life his way. Zichrono livrachah – may his memory always be a blessing. Amen.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2012/5773

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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