Rosh HaShanah: Morning Service

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2020/5781

Fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L’shana tova.

Yom Kippur

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2019/5780

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

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

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

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

Essentially, the three roles of the Israelite prophet are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2019/5780

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

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

This fish - it’s not - gefilte!

Gefilte - this fish it - is not!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Messiah comes he will say to us 

I apologize that I took so long, 

But I had a little trouble finding you,

Over here a few and over there a few

You were hard to reunite 

But everything is going to be all right

Up in heaven there, how I wrung my hands

When they exiled you from the promised land

Into Babylon you went like castaways

On the first of many, many moving days.

What a day and what a blow!

How terrible I felt you’ll never know!

When Messiah comes he will say to us:

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

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

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

You shall never more take flight, 

Yes, everything is going to be alright!

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

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

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

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Nefesh Service

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2019/5780

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yom Kippur: Truth

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2018/5779

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s not be snake oil salesmen to ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s a fact.

Rosh HaShanah: Thinking Horizontally

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2018/5779

This morning is a first. Behold, we have combined the downstairs TIPTY creative service with the traditional Sanctuary service to fashion something of a hybrid. We thought it might be nice for the generations to get a sense of what each other are up to. In this room we celebrate a hallowed history of worship. Our kids are thinking about tomorrow. It’s a nice blend.

One of our great biblical prophets, Yoel, said that the old shall dream dreams and the youth shall see visions. This prophet understood the delicate balance between those of us who represent the past and those who are the guardians of the future.

Yoel is what one of my favorite Kabbalah teachers called a horizontal prophet. A horizontal prophet is concerned with making clear God’s wishes, but equally about the welfare and future of the people. Isaiah, whom we will read on Yom Kippur, is a classic horizontal prophet when he tells us that our fasting on that day has to do not so much with our saying sorry to God, but with unlocking the yoke of poverty and not allowing another to go hungry.
Then there is the famous Amos – another horizontal prophet – who demanded Justice to flow like the mighty stream – in real human terms.

Vertical prophets, on the other hand, are all zealots for God. They are single-minded, caring only about pushing God’s agenda, sort of “stumping for God,” publicizing the Divine greatness with no regard for the people other than that they obey Divine law. They are extremists with one unalterable point of view, and one that rarely addresses the future welfare of others.

A classic example of a vertical prophet is Elijah. You’ve heard mostly the good press on Elijah. You’ve sung his song, put out his cup on Passover. But Elijah was a hot-headed God promoter who was more interested in punishing sinful Israelites than investing in the future and believing that we and our offspring mean business.

Contrast Elijah with Abraham who, in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, challenged God’s own judgment to not act rashly in consideration of potential decent human character. Hey, there may be some decent folks in these towns!” Give humanity a chance!

Abraham’s goal was the future of humanity. His faith was tested many times, and he managed to show both his fealty to his God, and a love for the people he was forging into a nation. Abraham was a true horizontal prophet.

Oddly enough, the story we just heard chanted from the Torah is the one test Abraham almost failed! High atop Mount Moriah, Abraham almost becomes a vertical prophet, acting only for the sake of some bizarre Divine instruction to sacrifice his only son, and literally annihilate the future. He takes Isaac up the mountain, picks up the knife ready to end the future right there, and almost does the deed.

Spoiler alert: An angel stops him just in time! But just to keep you guessing, the Torah describes the two of them ascending the mountain, with no mention of Isaac on the way down, as though to give us a sense of what it would have been like, had the great Abraham cared nothing about the coming generations. It’s a sobering message to anyone who ignores the urgent calling of the future!

On the holiday of Shavuot this last spring I was asked to address our 10th grade confirmation students. Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Ten Commandments, but I wasn’t worried about these kids keeping the Ten Commandments. They were fifteen good kids and I didn’t spot very many potential adulterers, idol worshippers, thieves, or murderers among them. Well, there was this one kid, but never mind…

So I chose instead to give them five rules I hope they will break as they take our world into the future. Five expectations that many adults have about their likely behavior that I want them to prove false.

Rule #1

The statistics tell us that you millennials are going to replace human interaction with tech media; that some of you spend close to 6 hours a day on devices. I’d like to give a vote for looking at each other in the eyes. There really is no substitute.

Yes, it is true that Israeli technology came up with a lot of the science that led to smart media, but Jews have taught for thousands of years that real physical community is essential to our wellbeing. We need to sing and dance with each other. We need to agree and disagree with one another face to face. We need to hold each other accountable. We need to look each other in the eye. Peace negotiations are rarely made over wireless.

The Torah says that we, not our handheld devices, are, body and soul, created in the image of God. Silicon Valley says the rule is that they will tell you how to conduct your relationships. I told them to break that rule!

Rule #2

The numbers predict that when these kids come of age to vote in a few short years, more than half are not going to cast a ballot in local, state, or national elections. In the last national election, 40% of all eligible voters didn’t bother to go to the polls, and the percentage was even higher among young voters.

Our kids are growing up on a steady diet of complaining about our elected officials. How laws are being pushed through that do not have your best interests at heart. As a firm believer in the ancient Jewish law of karma I think we get what we deserve. Our generation, either by our vote or our abstention, brought about this political atmosphere.

There are people out there that are planning your future for you and are banking on the likelihood that you are going to stay home on voting day. If you have strong feelings about the issues – trade, foreign policy, LGBTQ rights, the climate, gun violence – make your voices heard and elect those who are concerned with your health, safety, and welfare.

One young person told me recently that she was not interested in politics or voting because, quote, “the politicians have ruined our world.” Maybe. But they work for you and they need to hear from you!

On Yom Kippur we will read the famous Torah passage that commands us to “choose life.” Most folks think the important word in that phrase is “life.” Actually the important word is “choose!”

Jewish historian, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was noted to have said: the opposite of justice is not injustice, it is indifference. The opposite of peace is not war, it is indifference. The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.

Right now the rule out there says that over half of you are not going to exercise your right to vote. Break that rule!

Rule #3

You kids are inheriting a planet from us that we have not taken very good care of. The statistics about rising sea levels and alarming temperatures and storm systems are dire. We react to it as though the problem is insurmountable and we have passed the tipping point for climate change and it is out of our hands. But that is old-people talk. That is vertical prophecy nonsense. That is the language of people looking 50 years down the line and saying: “well, I won’t be alive anyway.” But you and your children will be.

The direction we take from today onward is very much in your control. If you think the people in charge of protecting the environment are not doing a good job, replace them. If you think the systems and energy policies of our nation are wrong-headed, change them.

Our Torah commands us back in Genesis: “be good stewards of the planet.” That instruction has never been more consequential than at this moment in human history.

The rule says your generation and ours are too self-absorbed to do anything globally. Break that rule!

Rule #4 - Israel

Many of you kids will soon find yourselves at a university that has an active anti-Zionist campaign going. The folks who may confront you about the Jewish state have done their homework. So learn your facts about Israel and its unique position in the 4,000 year history of the Jewish people. It is ok to take issue with the policies of the Jewish state. The history of Israel is not without blemish. But it is not ok to deny Israel’s very right to exist. No other country on the face of this planet has its existence regularly called into question.

You may find yourselves engaged in passionate debate about the Jewish state. So learn about Israel’s role in the world, including the many attempts to live in peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. Make up your own mind. Visit Israel. Get to know the people of Israel, and the amazing globally healing actions that are coming out of that country.

The rule says that with every passing year fewer and fewer American Jewish youth are connecting with Israel. Break that rule!

And lastly, Rule #5 - Religious Affiliation

According to the polls on trends in religious groups in this country, 60% or more of you are going to choose to not be affiliated with any official religious institution whatsoever.

Sooner or later every human being on the planet finds some type of belief system. It may not be an officially recognized faith system like Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, but sooner or later you, and your children after you will fall into a set of beliefs. You can certainly leave it up to chance. I think associating with a Jewish institution that fosters Jewish values will be good for you.

Did religious school totally prepare you for life in the real world? Maybe not. But there are millions of people out there spewing warped value systems, and millions more who are seeking to belong to something. Just surf the net and you’ll find them. Online communities have their purpose, but they do not, for the most part, console the bereaved, feed the hungry, provide companionship during life’s hard moments, or put ancient hallowed values to work in a world of people in need.

The rule says many of you are going to turn away from your heritage. Please break that rule.

Elijah the vertical prophet did not believe much in the will and ability of humanity’s future. He didn’t have faith in the children.

And so there were consequences for Elijah: The Bible story tells us that God gets sick and tired of him, actually firing Elijah from the position of chief prophet! Elijah is pink slipped and replaced by another fellow. Turns out that God of Israel has more faith in our young people and in humanity than the prophet.

Equally strange is that Elijah’s death is never reported, as though to suggest that he lives on eternally and as a punishment of sorts he must bear witness to how the people behave. Elijah is therefore eternally condemned to appear as a featured guest with his own center stage seat at every bris that will ever occur in the Jewish future. That’s why we set a chair for Elijah at our covenantal ceremonies.

He doesn’t attend brises because he loves smoked salmon and knishes. No. Elijah is being forced to witness our undying Jewish devotion to the future. That we will not allow ourselves to get trapped with old festering ideas, but to embrace tomorrow.

In my opinion, any philosophy that cares more about today than tomorrow is not a Jewish philosophy.

And what is the most well-known thing about Elijah? As the Passover Seder draws to its conclusion, a child is asked to go open the door for that famous guest who is running on Jewish time. It is a child who greets Elijah.

Why does Elijah have to show up at every Seder? To witness eternally that the Jewish people are committed to freedom eternally. Not just with our own, but with everyone’s freedom. And not just about our historical freedom, but our future redemption. He gets there just in time to hear us say “next year in Jerusalem,” which is really shorthand for “let us do the Messianic work we need to do to make next year healthier, saner, cleaner, holier, gentler, and more peaceful than this last year was.”

It is a child who goes to the door! Always a child! Because Elijah the vertical prophet needs to look squarely in the eye the young person who is going to inherit tomorrow.

Alas, we live in a world of too much vertical prophecy. We are so sure of ourselves. We retreat into our camps. We have stopped listening to the other voice. Our immediate security in the present moment overrides our concern for the future. And when we do this, the first thing that gets sacrificed is the world of our children and grandchildren.

As the great horizontal prophet Yoel said: “The old shall dream dreams and the youth shall see visions.” Our greatest prophets were about investing in the future, and this, I believe, is where we need to firmly set our sights: knowing that the only way to ensure tomorrow is to invest in those who are being born today.

L’shanah tovah.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Where Was Grandpa?

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2018/5779

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyn y’hi ratzon…

Yom Kippur: It’s Not About the Bloodline

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2017/5778

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2017/5778

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

Yom Kippur: Misrepresentation

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2016/5777

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosh HaShanah: An Entire World

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2016/5777

This is a year of celebration of our community. We expanded our Temple on a yuuuuuuuuuuge level! You came through our ginourmous lobby of 1.6 million square feet; our sanctuary now seats 65,000 people; we are partnered with over 20 different food and beverage companies; there are 125 suites overlooking the field; we have 1200 HD flat screen televisions, and the largest glass pivoting doors in the world! At our coffee bar you can get a beer for $11.50 a glass and… Wait, oh, how embarrassing. I’m being told I apparently have the incorrect building status report.

But those numbers are impressive, no? And ours are too! 6000 congregants, 2200 family units. I have to admit, I throw around big numbers all the time. Lots of folks do! There are over 7 billion people in the world. Did you know that the Powerball Jackpot is currently $47.5 million? Someone told me at Torah study this last Shabbat that there are something like 8 trillion stars in our universe!

When we use words like 6 million Jews, or read that 450,000 Syrians have been killed in that civil war which still rages on, we are dismayed, but on some level we cannot wrap our minds around big numbers of people. Their identities are drowned out by the brash statistic. When, after all, in our day to day lives, do we deal with 6 million or 450,000 of anything??

No matter how big we get, and no matter how colossal the numbers are in the daily news from distant lands, we are hardwired to deal with one person at a time. Our Talmud teaches us whosoever saves a single life it is as though he has saved an entire world.

Many years ago a documentary film was made about a classroom in Whitwell, Tennessee, a small community of 1600 people. They were studying the Holocaust and the consequences of extreme prejudice. The kids in Whitwell knew about hatred. The KKK had been founded about a hundred miles from their town. The challenge for the teachers was when the kids asked: What is Six Million?

Their solution was to have the kids try and collect 6 million paper clips in order to wrap their young minds around the enormous number of victims. They succeeded in doing so. Now they knew what the number 6 million meant.

Last week our scholar-in-residence was Yehudit Shendar from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. So we were steadying ourselves to hear from her about the millions of Jews who lost their lives during the Shoah, the real impact of her presentation, and this is definitely how she “rolls,” was when she began to tell us individual stories.

She told us, in loving detail, about Petr Ginz, one 14 year old Czechoslovakian boy, a gifted artist and author who wrote novels and created drawings while imprisoned in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, and who continued to write and draw even in Auschwitz where he was murdered. How Petr dreamed, in 1943, of flying in a rocket into space. And how 60 years later his drawing of an imagined moon landscape actually accompanied the first Israeli Astronaut Ilan Ramon on the ill-fated Columbia Mission.

A chill went up our collective spine when Dr. Shendar told us that the morning on which the Columbia disintegrated upon reentry into the earth’s atmosphere on February 1st, 2003 in the skies over Texas… happened to be the very day Peter Ginz would have turned 75 years old! Now the dark history became real. There, in the tragedy, hope and glory of one 14 year old boy, and the world’s first Israeli astronaut, lay the human drama.

Remember a single life, and you save an entire world.

Experts tell us that compassion fatigue sets in not when the number of victims reaches the hundreds or thousands, but when we hear about the fate of even two people! It seems we are hard-wired to relate to each other one at a time.

Lots of numbers flew at us last year, but what were the images that penetrated our consciences - the little boy washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean; the Syrian child who survives the bombing of his city and sits, shell-shocked, staring at us from the back of the ambulance.

Witness a single life, and you see an entire world.

Yes, we rejoice in being a large Temple community. But in reality we are built around individual joy, individual achievement, individual pain. Our shiva houses are mobbed because one family has lost one beloved person. Caring Bridge communications online when a single friend has a life threatening illness. Our community gets energized when we coalesce around one loss, when we trot out one young thirteen year old for her Bat Mitzvah, when we name one baby.

Just about a month ago the fate of Jacob Wetterling became known to us. Here is one young life, a boy whose whereabouts were unknown for 27 years, a tragic mystery that somehow galvanized a community. We cried, we waited, we searched and we hurt right alongside the Wetterling family for 27 years. We marveled at Patty Wetterling’s tenacity of spirit as she ran for public office, like she was our own mother, or sister. People in our congregation talked about how they were 11 years old when Jacob was 11 years old and feel as though they “grew up with him.” And when we finally learned what had befallen Jacob, we felt that strange combination of horror and relief, again, along with the Wetterling family.

Remember one young life, and you have remembered an entire world.

You have to ask yourself, how can it be, that such a thing happens to a family you don’t even know and may never even meet, and still you agonize alongside them and find relief, with them, in knowing, finally, an answer? This is what is truly meant by community. And we as Jews should celebrate it!

A friend of mine was a student rabbi years ago in the northeast. He used to marvel that many members of his tiny congregation, some of them over 80 years old, would somehow make it to services even in the midst of a big snowstorm. When he asked, one woman responded, “well, I wouldn’t want Ethel to be disappointed by my not showing up.” Another said: “well, Fred won’t know what to do without me here.”

The humorist Harry Golden tells the story of his father, a notorious atheist who nevertheless went to synagogue every single Saturday morning. When Harry asked his father about it, he replied, "Look, everyone goes to shul for a different reason. Garfinkel goes to synagogue to talk to God. I go to synagogue to talk to Garfinkel."

It is no coincidence that when any U.S. President gives the State of the Union address the high point of the talk is often when he points up to the gallery and identifies one soldier, one national hero, one individual story of heartbreak, one person’s act of courage. Even when you are speaking to millions of people through the media, you can’t portray the whole country as simply a mass of humanity – you have to look at the people – one by one.

Before construction began on Temple’s new addition, we invited members of the Kenwood neighborhood to a forum to talk about the new building. We asked if any individual had an issue with what we were proposing. Not a soul objected. Maybe it’s because we are good neighbors. Maybe it is because the people who come in and out of this building care about the individuals they meet up with on the street. Or maybe it is because we cared what each of them thought.

You know, there have been many stunning moments in this campaign season, and I’ll bet we’re in for a lot more, but one of my personal favorites was when, in addressing the plight of Syrian refugees and immigration quotas someone asked the question: If I had a big bowlful of Skittles and told you that just three of them would kill you, would you take a handful?

Called upon for comment, a spokesperson for the Mars Candy Company, maker of Skittles, had the wisdom to point out, quote: Skittles are candy, refugees are people. We don’t feel this is an appropriate analogy.

Personally, I imagined a group of Jews ferrying out to the Statue of Liberty to scrub the obscene graffiti off the Emma Lazarus poem and to re-hoist the lamp beside the golden door that the Statue of Liberty dropped when she heard the Skittles comment!

But here’s the more Jewish response: If you knew that in that teeming mass of people there were three who would bring joy and wisdom, brilliance, initiative and innovation to our society, could you refrain from bringing them to safety? If you knew that in that bowl of humanity was young Petr Ginz, who dreamed of flying to the moon, and would have delighted us endlessly with art, stories, visions and achievements, who may have discovered a cure for disease or devised new sources for clean and renewable energy, could we refrain from opening our golden door to him?

Save a single life, and you have saved an entire world.

We can talk big numbers, statistics, we can talk millions, hundreds of thousands, or dozens crowded on life rafts floating in the Mediterranean. But better each of us should think of a single person, or her descendent, someone  whom we know personally, even we ourselves, who would not be alive today had more Americans angrily protested the immigration of Jewish refugees to this country during World War II.

The Jewish people knows what it means to be counted as numbers. We’ve had them tattooed on our arms. We are commanded, in our tradition, never to count people. The Prophet Hosea said: And the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which shall never be counted. The great sage Maimonides warned that to count people like so many cattle is a sin against God and humanity.

The paper-clip-collecting children of Whitwell Tennessee didn’t learn the lesson when millions of paper clips arrived in their classrooms. They got it when they saw the clips that held the name of a single person, or the faded yellow Jewish star, or the identification papers… the single photograph.

We are a people who love people. We find our treasures in the individuals we know. We celebrate milestones, one Jew at a time. We share the pain of those who have lost that special person they love. This is what is meant by community.

As big numbers come your way in the coming weeks, don’t think so big. Forget the 65,000 seats. Think of the individual fan. Never mind the 8 trillion stars – think of the fragile planet Earth. Don’t ruminate on 6 million Jews. Think of Petr Ginz. Don’t let the number 450,000 lull you into the stupor of indifference. Think of the one child in the ambulance staring past the camera.

And thus our Talmud teaches: To save one life is to have saved an entire world!

When Jacob Wetterling’s murderer led the authorities to his grave last month, tens of thousands of people uttered a communal gasp.

Why, on one of the holiest days on the Jewish calendar would a synagogue community, and a rabbi giving a sermon, want to remember Jacob Wetterling, an 11 year old boy who went missing 27 years ago? What does it have to do with us? What does the story of just one boy have to do with you and me?

Everything. For he was an entire world.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Laughing and Dreaming

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2016/5777

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join me as we sing the song together.

Yom Kippur: Who I Want to Be

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2015/5776

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My differential was 37 points.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L’shana tova.

Erev Yom Kippur: What’s in a Name?

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2015/5776

Being a bit of a “know it all” I like to tell people that on Yom Kippur it is not really appropriate to say “Good Yontov” because it is not a Yom Tov. And Happy New Year is never really the correct greeting.

The usual response is: well what the heck should I say??

Probably the safest bet is G’mar Hatimah Tova, or G’mar tov, meaning “May you be inscribed for blessing in the book of life. And that conjures up the image of our names being inked into some celestial document as the old Jewish folk song says it: “He makin’ a list, and checkin’ it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.”

But our names seem to hold some importance. One thing we all have in common tonight is that each of us has a name. Some of us love our names, others maybe not so much.

I grew up with a weird name. My parents named me Simeon Israel Glaser. Simeon being the biblical equivalent of Sigmund, named after my mother’s deceased father who perished in the Shoah. Israel is the name given by the Nazis in 1939 to all Jewish men, Sarah was the name for all Jewish women, so that the Germans could identify Jews. In those dark days no newborn German Jewish baby could have a German name. My parents gave me the name Israel in a defiance of that law.

Our names all come from somewhere, and usually to some purpose. The names we bestow on our children are laden with meaning for those who name us, but also of course for us who are named. To some extent, every name becomes sort of an assignment, a destiny even. You learn to live with the name, and it shapes you.

I have been intrigued my entire life by the names people give their children. Rabbi Jared Saks, our previous assistant rabbi used to speak of a friend he had growing up by the name of Nancy Cianci. Yes, the Cianci’s named their daughter Nancy, and it gets better – her middle name was Anne. She was, in fact, Nancy Anne Cianci. I’m sure each of us has a story of a name beyond belief we heard or read somewhere. There is an entire website dedicated to delightfully odd names.

Many years ago there was a popular Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue. I have always related to it personally. Goes a little something like this:

My daddy left home when I was three

And he didn't leave much to ma and me

Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.

Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid

But the meanest thing that he ever did

Was before he left, he went and named me "Sue."

The song then details how “Sue” grew up strong and resilient and able to defend himself in difficult times. He meets up with his dad, they have a fierce barroom brawl, and are about to kill each other when the dad says,

Listen son, this world is rough

And if a man's gonna make it,

he's gotta be tough

And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along.

So I give ya that name and I said goodbye

I knew you'd have to get tough or die

And it's the name that helped to make you strong."

The song concludes on a note of acceptance, kind of as Sue, the narrator says:

And I think about him, now and then,

Every time I try and every time I win,

And if I ever have a son, I think I'm gonna name him…

Bill or George! Anything but Sue! I still hate that name!

And people choose to rename themselves. In Rabbinical School I had two classmates, Beth Jarecky and Jonathan Lubarsky who were married and were concerned about the hyphenated  Jarecky-Lubarsky for themselves or their children, so they up and decided to dump both names and adopt the name “Singer”, because they both love music. To this day they are Rabbis Jonathan and Beth Singer, and they are plenty happy in San Francisco as is their choir of little Singers.

Our Jewish tradition places huge importance on names. Sarah in the Torah is told she will bear a child at the age of 90 and says that everyone who hears of it will laugh, so the child is named Yitzchak  - meaning “laughter. Her grandson Jacob becomes Yisrael because he actually wrestles with an angel of God and that is what Yisrael means. His first and eldest son with Leah is to be named Reuven, a perfectly logical choice because it means “look, a son!” Many Hebrew names are given in relation to God. Yonatan means gift of God, Yoel means God is willing.

Modern Israeli names took on natural agricultural themes, like Ital (Island of Dew) or Tamar (date palm) or Tzvi (deer).

It is well known that in our tradition children are named after deceased relatives, often with the hope they will possess the best characteristics of those whom we have loved and lost. Some are named for great heroes. As many Jewish Abrahams are named for Lincoln as for the Torah’s first monotheist. Alexander has been a popular Jewish boy’s name that dates back to the famous Alexander the Great’s historic conquest of 4th century Palestine and his kind treatment of the Jewish people there. We never forget a favor.

Considering how many Jewish celebrities there are, it is interesting to note that rarely are Jewish children named after such notables. Even in biblical times those famous names, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel, Leah, Joseph and Moses - you know they do not reappear in the Jewish bible after that, and nobody really knows why this is. And curiously, not one scholar in the Talmud is named Abraham, Israel or David. Some names of biblical prophets are used, some not, and nobody seems to know why that is either.

Then there is the superstitious custom of changing a person’s name in the time of serious illness to confuse the angel of death as to whether He is visiting the correct person, like we can pull one over on the Angel of Death.

The bestowing of names is among the earliest themes in the Torah. As soon as creation happened naming things was put on the front burner. The rabbis have a wonderful Midrash for when Adam was created. Seems God was so excited and proud and told the angels: Look! Look at what I created. He’s so bright! But the angels were not impressed. He’s so smart? Come on, they said, what’s so great about him? We’re here in heaven with you. We’re the ones who know everything. But God is insistent and says: “Want to see?” and puts a four legged animal on the earth and says watch this: Adam says “this shall be called dog” and this one giraffe, and this one elephant. The angels are stumped. They couldn’t do this because they had never been to earth. And then Adam names himself Adam saying: I am Adam because I come from adamah – the earth itself.

And then comes a wonderful moment when God says to Adam: and what shall be your name for Me? Adam could have said anything. Could have said: Irving, or Shirley! But Adam said: You shall be called Adonai because you are Lord over all Your works.

Why is this important? Because in giving God that name we are the ones who declare God Master. We need to be servants and do God’s work. The name Adonai is crucial to our relationship with God. But we are the ones who make it so. By way of a name.

A lot of our young people over the years have confessed their difficulties with belief in God and I wonder sometimes if it isn’t a problem with the names and the descriptions we give to God that throws us off. Ruler, King, Savior and Protector… Names are what help us establish relationship. Look at all the nicknames and the pet names we give each other.

The word “God” itself is not of our creation. To truly understand the name of God you have to go to the Hebrew source. Confronting the letters Yud Hey Vav Hey we find it to be virtually unpronounceable. Try as you might the best you would get is the sound of breathing. (demonstrate).

If names are so important, why would the master of all creation have one that isn’t pronounceable? Perhaps it is because the meaning of our lives goes well beyond the name.

There is a story of a Sage who sends his young students out to find the best characteristic of a human being. The first student returns telling his master that the best characteristic of a human being is to have an ayin tovah, a good eye, a good outlook on the world. The next returns saying a person should have a shem tov, a good name. The third says one should be a haver tov - a good friend and neighbor. The last comes back and says the highest value for a person is that he or she should possess a lev tov. A Good heart. The Rebbe tells his students that these are all good answers, and each is a valued part of a person’s character, but he says the best answer is to have a lev tov. A good heart.

Perhaps this story holds a key to the puzzle. Maybe our names really are not our last word. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, some playwright once said. Montegue or not, Romeo would be as beloved to his Juliet. Yes, we are given names, like labels on cans, but it is the goodness of our hearts that ultimately determine the power of your name, and not the other way around. We read in Pirkei Avot - Al tistakel b’kankan, eleh b’mah she yesh bo”. Don’t look at the label, rather at the contents.

When we ask God to inscribe us in the book of life for a sweet and healthy year, on some level we hope that our name will be listed in that “book”. But what really matters is what heft we are going to bring to our name over the coming year. How are we going to make the name that we were given count, the name we have schlepped hither and yon for lo these many decades, how are we going to make that name be worthy of blessing this year.

Perhaps this is why the great master of Hasidism was called the Ba’al Shem Tov - Master of the good name. There are two ways to translate Ba’al Shem Tov. The one who owns the holy name and therefore brings Divine power to whatever he does. Or the one who is characterized by a good reputation. I prefer the latter. His shem, his name is “tov” - good - because wherever he journeyed he brought good things to people. His name now had power.

However we feel about our names, no matter whom we are named for, or what our parents had in mind when they gave our names to us, maybe this year we will think about what it means to go forth in this world and lead others to associate our name with goodness, with kindness, with love of humanity.

If this happens, then no matter what your name is. Irving, Bertha, Nancy, Sue, Shlemiel Shlemazel, or, God help you, Simeon, your name, when heard by others, will bring joy and healing.

The poet Zelda wrote: Each of us has a name, given by God, given by our father and mother. Each of us has a name, given by our stature and our way of smiling, and given by our clothing. Each of us has a name given by the planets and given by our neighbors, given by our sins and given by our longing. Each of us has a name given by our enemies and by our love. Each of us has a name given by the seasons of the year and given to us by our blindness. Each of us has a name given by the ocean and given by our death.

G’mar hatima tovah, may we be inscribed for blessings in the book of life. May all our names ascend to lofty heights, and be associated with goodness and peace, because it is our will to make it so.

L’shana tova.

Rosh HaShanah: Gratitude in Our DNA

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2015/5776

I was in the nation’s capitol a few weeks ago. A hundred rabbis were having dinner in, of all places, the National Archives, which they had closed to the public. Now you understand how important rabbis are? They closed the National Archives so we could have dinner there. It was surreal to hear someone actually say the words: “Please don’t get any BBQ sauce on the Constitution.” 

After dessert and a speaker, we rabbis had the entire museum to ourselves to party with the founding fathers! There an old buddy, Rabbi Sidney from Chicago and I, found ourselves face to face with the Declaration of Independence – yes, the original!!

My eyes were quickly drawn to the words:  “We have a right, endowed by our Creator, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” and I thought about how very seriously we modern Americans take that inalienable right to pursue happiness. 

From there we entered an exhibit of the American history of immigration and inclusion. African Americans, European Jews, Asians, Latinos, the huddled masses who over the centuries have come to these borders grateful to be integrated into a growing thriving democratic society. 

I knew that logged somewhere in the hundreds of millions of records was my own mother’s arrival in this great nation.  She too was ready to seek happiness in her new home, thankful for the possibility of a new beginning, hopeful for the arrival of her parents. 

That, of course, was not to happen. They were trapped in a land where their most basic human rights ,and ultimately their lives, were to be taken from them. 

The Archives tell how Americans have expressed their gratitude over the centuries for the precious gift of living in a successful democracy by a dedication to responsibility, to an active participation in community. In political activism. In shaping our culture. 

It has not been lost on subsequent American Jewish generations that one’s right to vote in free elections is nothing short of a miracle to be thankful for. Just look at the countries these immigrants had fled. At the Archives and at the Holocaust Museum down the street, it is notably documented that Adolf Hitler ascended to power in the last German democratic election largely because of those who did not exercise their right to vote. 

As an election year approaches it is good to remind ourselves of free democratic elections. It has recently been noted that of our youngest voters in this nation, those aged 18-24, less than 20% find their way to the polls to vote in national elections. 

As I speak to you this morning, we see refugees in the millions fleeing horrible situations in search of a better life, and a world that is increasingly fearful of taking them in. Imagine in the year 2015, Hungarian transport trains destined for camps where the inmates are assigned numbers! There is nothing new, it seems, under the sun. The ongoing debate as to how we handle immigrants to this great land should send chills down the spine of anyone in this room who comes from a history of immigration. Excepting our Native American congregants, I believe that is every one of us!

One thing seemed very clear standing in the Capitol and seeing artifacts that chronicle the birth of our nation - Sensitivity to the plight of others has always begun with an appreciation of our own blessings. We simply cannot care about others if we have no gratitude for the goodness that is our legacy.

And yet how quick we are to forget to be thankful. The very character of a nation that provides us with the right of self-determination, the pursuit of happiness and success, and has allowed so many of us to succeed and thrive, may well have lulled us into a sense of sanguine acceptance.

This is nothing new. The final book of the Torah, Devarim, taught a lesson as relevant today as it was 3000 years ago when it first made the Israelite best seller list: When you come into a land already blossoming and fertile and bountiful, with everything prepared and ready for you, you might think you just deserve it. You may even come to believe it was all your doing. 

The biblical author, writing thousands of years ago was aware that even those of us with health, safety, loving friends and family, social intimacy, financial success and material wealth still might sense that there is something missing from their lives. What could it be? 

We have become like the child who is given the gift of a luscious orange from the fruit vendor, and when his mother instructs him: “now honey, what do you say to the nice man?” the child hands the orange back to the man and says: “oh yeah, peel it.” 

And thus the Torah repeatedly instructs us a simple mitzvah: Give thanks!

Gratitude is more than a religious imperative. It is a necessary way to make sense and order out of a confusing complex world. Gratitude may well be the antidote to the cynicism that is all around us and part of us. As our pessimism about a world in turmoil is lifted, new possibilities come into view. 

And if health is your concern, you should know that the cultivation of gratitude has been shown to enhance our physical well-being! 

The Declaration of Independence guarantees our right to pursue happiness, but it doesn’t come with instructions. I looked for footnotes on how to pursue happiness. There are no such footnotes! 

In Washington the author journalist Ari Shavit spoke to us said he always believed that “morality is in the DNA of the Jewish people.” Perhaps, I thought, but then so must gratitude be our DNA! After all, the biblical character Yehuda, from which we get our religion’s name comes from the verb l’hodot and means “grateful”.

You know, our Bar and Bat Mitzvah students write their speeches and they talk Torah and then they thank folks who made their big day possible. I remember years back one Bat Mitzvah girl wrote two pages on the subjects in her Torah portion and 14 pages of thank yous. At the time I was aghast and insisted that she reverse the order of her priorities. But she refused, and thinking back on it I think maybe she had it right. The theme of her speech was gratitude for the people who make up her life and have seen to her well-being. 

Gratitude is hard for some of us because it implies humility. Like the ancient Israelites, how quickly we forget that we could not have reached our lofty status without the help of others. One famous Jewish immigrant, portrayed in the Archives, Albert Einstein, notably said “I have to remind myself a thousand times a day of how much I depend on other people for my success.” 

Gratitude is the song human beings are supposed to sing. A song of humility and awe at what surrounds us. Remember the palpable chill in the crowd when President Obama broke into song at the memorial for the Charleston Nine? And the song? Amazing Grace of course. How sweet the sound. And how beautifully strange to hear the Commander in Chief sing the humble words “A wretch like me”. 

In listening to the first Republican debate several weeks back I was amazed by how each of the candidates, almost without exception, linked himself to his “humble” origins. I think they knew they were touching a national nerve, and wanted voters to know that they appreciated the opportunities this great nation affords people. That such gratitude was an essential part of being an American. 

There is much to be grateful for, even right here and now. A day devoted to prayer may not strike you as a gratitude opportunity, but look at it this way… Like the precious offering of new life given to the immigrant, this is a day given to us to begin anew! What other systems of thought or institutions grant you a “do over” in your life? 

I do think that the inclination to express gratitude is in our DNA. Every earthly being has their song. Coyotes howl at the moon. Rivers flow north to south. Flowers rise up to greet pollinating bees. Birds serenade one another. Children laugh and play spontaneously, smiling an average of 400 times a day! Our song is gratitude. It should be as natural as our breathing. 

This last spring I was invited as a scholar in residence to my old congregation, Beth Israel in West Hartford, CT. I was reunited with, among others, the temple custodians. One of them, a Jamaican gentleman named Bunny, greeted me at the door and it was like 17 years had passed in a day. I shared a reminiscence with Bunny from those many years ago. It was the end of a long day at Temple and as I opened the door to the parking lot I saw that it was pouring rain. “Damn it” I said rather un-rabbinically, and then there was a hand on my shoulder. I turned and it was Bunny the custodian who said words I have never forgotten: “Rabbi, the rain is a blessing.” 

At that moment I felt as though I should be setting up and taking down the chairs and Bunny the Custodian should be preaching on Rosh Hashanah. In typical fashion I had forgotten the integral part of being Jewish is to be grateful and to bless things, especially things that have somehow become ordinary or even burdensome to us. 

In that same congregation the domed ceiling was made up of over 7000 individual bricks. I had been told that over the hundred years of its existence about 6 of those bricks had come loose. On my not so good days at Beth Israel I would stare up at the ceiling and wonder which brick was going to come loose next. And if it was going to land on me! 

I recently learned, to my astonishment, that there is actually a condition known as Missing Tile Syndrome. When one sees the ceiling of tiles and only notices the ones that have become dislodged. When you look at the jigsaw puzzle and only see the pieces missing. 

Or the two shoe salespeople who are sent to an African country to scout out retail possibilities. One writes back, “Situation hopeless, no one here wears shoes!” The other writes: “Glorious business opportunity! They have no shoes!” 

Missing Tile Syndrome runs counter to Jewish thinking. We are supposed to look at our surroundings and engage in hakarat hatov – expressions of gratitude for what IS there… not despair at what is missing. We are supposed to look at each other and rather than note what is missing from their character, seek the good they possess. 

And the same goes for our own self-assessment. In ten days we will be called upon to recite all the sins, the flaws in our character. But why not take some time over the next several days to count the bricks that are still in the ceiling? Note the wonderful things about yourself. The gifts you bring to this world. The blessing you are to others. Be grateful for being you. Nobody else does it as well! And remember - all gratitude begins with the self. If you aren’t grateful for who you are, you’ll have a heck of a time being grateful for the presence of others in your life. 

There is so much going on in the world right now that yanks us to the pessimistic; so much that scares us into the defense mechanism of being cynical and dismissive. So many voices telling us to beware the other voice. And yet there are stories of Amazing Grace that must be a regular part of our life’s narrative. 

Standing in the archives in DC I was moved by the stunning portraits of men who came together in political consensus to shape American policy that would guide generations to come. And I immediately gravitated to thoughts of how divided and cynical we have become as a nation on so many issues. 

How do we move from this antagonism, mistrust, cynicism to a place of wonder and gratitude for what we do have, even in the face of rancor and bitter loss? 

We might start with those who have faced loss and still come out grateful for what they have. When a gunman took the lives of those 9 worshippers in Charleston the violence stunned the nation, but equally stunning was the victims’ families’ forgiveness of the shooter. A man who lost his mother that sad day said: “Love is always stronger than hate, so if we would just love, the way my mom loved, hate wouldn’t be anywhere close to where love is.” From a state of grief comes such a natural outpouring of gratitude for the gift of love that can conquer even tragedy! 

Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal wrote a story he related to a rabbi soon after the conclusion of the Second World War. “In the camp,” Wiesenthal said to Rabbi Silver, “there was one religious man who somehow managed to smuggle in a siddur. At first, I greatly admired the man for his courage—, but the next day I realized, to my horror, that this man was ‘renting out’ this siddur to people in exchange for food. People were giving him their last piece of bread for a few minutes with the prayer book. This man, who was very thin and emaciated when the whole thing started, was soon eating so much that he died before everyone else—his system couldn’t handle it.”  Wiesenthal continued his story to the rabbi: “If this is how religious Jews behave, I’m not going to have anything to do with a prayer book.” 

As he was about to turn and leave the rabbi touched him on the shoulder and gently said: “Simon, why do you look at the Jew who used his siddur to take food out of starving people’s mouths? Why don’t you look at the many Jews who gave up their last piece of bread in order to be able to use a siddur? 

As I flew out of Washington, over the tributes of gratitude to those who gave their lives for this country, over the majestic monuments to great leaders, over the seat of western democracy I gave thanks for a day of learning and inspiration and it felt mighty natural to do so. 

Prayer comes in many forms. The berakhot – the praises we utter to our Creator; the bakashot, the petitions, the requests, and we are pretty good at those. And then there are, and the hoda’ot – the thank you’s. The Talmud teaches that in the end of days, when the messiah has arrived, and every single thing is perfect, and we are all joined together, and one with God, with not a single thing wrong in a perfected universe, the only prayers left to say in our little siddurim will be those prayers of gratitude. The hoda’ot. Yes, even when all hopes and dreams are answered, we will still be required to sing songs of gratitude. 

Gratitude is in our DNA. We have only to let it flow.

Yom Kippur: For Shame

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2014/5775

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erev Yom Kippur: The Beauty and Power of Friendships

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2014/5775

This summer I fulfilled a life-long ambition to see one of the Beatles live in the flesh. Yes, I was at the Paul McCartney concert and though he was a good distance away and made visible to us in the stands only by virtue of the jumbo tron video screen, I thought he was totally fab.

Paul’s set list was pretty predictable, even though he has penned hundreds of popular songs, 60 of which were #1 hits. But his inclusion of the song Eleanor Rigby I thought was interesting. Almost as though he felt that his message from way back in 1966: “all the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people, where do they all belong?” was still an eternal message, befitting a 72 year old man who has lost a wife to cancer and been through a very public divorce and now married to a Jewish woman.

I have a confession to make on this erev Yom Kippur. I am an introvert. I play an extrovert on TV, or on the rabbi job. Sometimes better than others. I have, over the years, often worn that introvert distinction as a badge of honor thinking that, on some level, it was cool to keep to myself. Well into middle age, I don’t look at it that way anymore. I now think of my introversion as something of a liability.

Clearly it is easier for extroverts to make friends. And as many a researcher will report, friendships are good for you. Friendships help you live longer. People who have studied happiness, comparing happy people with unhappy people find that the only external factor distinguishing the two groups was the presence, or the lack thereof, of rich and satisfying social relationships.

When I deliver eulogies at funerals, I always get choked up when I get to the part about the friends of the deceased. No matter what kind of wealth the deceased amassed, or how many countries they visited or how well known they were, the friends they made along the way seem to stand out as a true value.

And conversely, there have been those whom I have met along the way of my rabbinical career who, sadly enough, arrive at their last days with profound regret at all the time they spent alone, apart, for one reason or another, from their loved ones or old friends. Acting as though someday they’d set it all straight, and then that day never comes.

Acquiring friends has a long and rich tradition within Judaism. When the first two Jews, Abraham and Sarah, leave Haran to begin their trek out into the world to bring the blessings of Judaism with them it says, “and they took with them all the people they had gathered in Haran.” The Hebrew translates better to the souls they “made” in Haran. Now, we know that human beings don’t create other human beings; so the rabbis understood this to mean that Abraham and Sarah had taken them in, like family, to be with them, to nurture their spirits. We know about Abraham and Sarah that their tent-home was always open to strangers passing by. That they would welcome anybody in, bath their feet and give them food and drink. Obviously, forging friendships was very important to Abraham and Sarah. Somehow they understood that to build a great religion like Judaism was going to require the cement of friendships.

Judaism has connected learning with friendship. The Talmud says: Acquire a teacher, and you have a friend for life!

We know that friendship helps people make better judgments. A major part of a deep friendship is in thinking through problems together: what job is best for us to take? What life goals should we follow? How should we deal with difficult people? Whom to marry? Friendship allows us to see our own life but with a second set of eyes, a sympathetic other standing beside us.

One beautiful element of friendship is that friends usually bring out better versions of each other. We let our guard down among our close friends. If you’re hanging around with a friend, smarter and funnier thoughts tend to come burbling out.

Individual creativity has long been celebrated, but it has been reported recently that the best decisions are not made by a person sitting alone in an office or at home, but by a group of friends around a table. The material they produce is richer, more human, more creative. Groups of three, four, or five perform better on complex problem solving than the best of an equivalent number of individuals.

Ancient writers dating way back to Aristotle have praised friendship, describing it as the preeminent human institution. They will tell you that in this life you can manage without marriage, or even do without justice or honor, but friendship is indispensable to life. Lovers face each other, it is said, but friends stand side-by-side, facing the world, sharing values and insights, often working together toward something of great value.

People behave better if they know their friends are observing. Friendship is based, in part, on common tastes and interests, but it is also based on mutual admiration and reciprocity. People tend to want to live up to their friends’ high regard. People don’t work at having close friendships in any hope of selfish gain, but simply for the pleasure itself of feeling known and respected.

While much of this may seem very obvious, you should know that friendship is not in great shape in America today. They’ve run the numbers. In 1985, people tended to have about three really close friends. By 2004, according to research, people were reporting they had only two close confidants. Over the next ten years the number of people who say they have no close confidants at all has tripled.

It seems that folks have a harder time these days building friendships across class lines. As society becomes more unequal and segmented, we tend to retreat into our camps. Most of the people we know come from our same socioeconomic world. Middle-aged people have particular problems nurturing friendships and building new ones because they are so busy with work and kids. 

The problem may be that we've lost sight of the real benefit of friendships. That the "what's in it for me" impulse in today's world has got us looking out for number one so significantly that other people don’t seem as important an element for our individual success. How ironic then that the best thing you can do for yourself is to forge a new friendship or refresh an old one.

So how do we go about this? One of the best ways for us to formulate, or as it was said in the Abraham and Sarah story “acquire” friends is to seek out a challenge, or a difficulty that needs to be worked out by a group. Instead of one person looking out for their own self, imagine a group of buddies engaging in something that benefits some other people entirely. Nothing inspires friendship like selflessness and cooperation in moments of difficulty.

This certainly is a good reason for belonging to a Temple community like ours. But it really only works if you have an eye on a bigger prize. Today people flock to conferences, ideas festivals, even vacation cruises that are really more about building friendships than anything else, even if people don’t admit it explicitly. There is a part of us that makes up excuses to find ourselves doing something with others. Book groups, minyans, sports teams.

One of my favorite stories concerns two boyhood friends, Eliphelet and Gidyon. They lived near each other and grew up together. Eventually they left their homes to find a place for themselves in the big world and each one did very well. But now they lived far apart from one another. And in those days before email and telephone it was hard to keep up friendships.

But Gidyon went traveling and found himself in the country where his friend Eliphelet lived and he thought, how great would it be to see his old buddy. But when he came to the gate of the city he was arrested by the police who thought he was a spy. He was brought immediately to trial and sentenced to death. As he waited there in prison he was very sad about his family whom he would never see again. Who would take care of them, he thought.

When the time came for his execution, Gidyon fell to his knees before the king and begged: Gracious king, I am innocent of any wrongdoing and yet I have been sentenced to this cruel punishment. I ask only one favor and that is that I be allowed one week – seven days - to return to my own country to say goodbye to my wife and children and to see that they will be alright. I give you my word as an honest Jew who has never broken a promise that I will return on time.

The king thought about it and asked: but who will guarantee that you will not try to escape?

Just then a man pushed his way out of the crowd and said: “Your highness, I will be his guarantee.” Of course that man was Gidyon’s boyhood friend Eliphelet who told the king: “You can imprison me, and if Gidyon doesn’t come back when he said he would, you can put me to death.

The king was astonished at this display of loyalty and friendship and allowed Gidyon to be freed to go back to his home. The people of the kingdom were amazed by this. They could not believe that the doomed man would ever possibly come back. They laughed at Eliphelet for volunteering to take his place.

Gidyon returned home, took care of his business, but told nobody of what fate awaited him in the distant country.

When those seven days had come and gone the city was ready for the execution and the entire kingdom came to see what would come of this strange event. It was nearly night time on the seventh day and no one expected Gidyon to return. Eliphelet was taken out of prison and placed beneath the gallows.

Suddenly they heard a loud cry – wait! I am here. Do not harm my dear friend. I am here to take his place. And Gidyon rushed through the crowd toward the king and the executioner. The people of the kingdom burst out in cheers and applause and then it grew quiet. The king was clearly touched by the loyalty of these two friends, and he spoke, saying: “Because of the true and devoted friendship of Eliphelet and Gidyon, I will pardon the crime of the stranger. But I do this on one condition. That they do me the favor of letting me be their friend as well.

I imagine many of us have friends that are separated from us by miles, and whom we would love to see more than we can. Just the other day I received an email from an old high school chum whom I never see and hardly ever speak to. I felt a strange sensation of wanting to hang out with him that surprised this introvert. I wrote back – do you have a minute to talk? He did. I called him and I was stunned by the warmth and good feeling I experienced in hearing his voice. In talking about the music we love in common. The places we used to hang out.

I said, you know, I’m coming east this winter and we should have a beer. And he gave me an out – he said, sure, if you make it to town give me a call. Somehow we both sadly knew that the chances of that happening were not good. That it might not be in the stars and he wanted me to know that he understood. He got it.

But you know, it doesn’t have to be in the stars. We are the architects of our lives. Our tradition tells us to dwell in community. Science tells us that companions are good for our health. Psychology teaches that better decisions are made in groups.

Judaism teaches that a good friend is a tower of strength: to find one is to find a treasure. In your search for a richer, more positive and healthy new year, may you rediscover the treasure to be found in renewing an old friendship, or simply rededicating yourself to enriching the ones you already have.

I’m going to give it a try. I hope you will too.

L’shana tova.

Rosh HaShanah: Do Not Slay The Other Voice

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2014/5775

Several years ago I attended a meeting of African American Ministers and Rabbis to discuss issues confronting our community. The minister whose church it was greeted the group saying: Can I hear a hallelujah? To which we all responded “hallelujah!” He then quickly side glanced at me and said “Rabbi I hope it’s alright that we said “hallelujah” to which I responded – no problem, it’s Hebrew. We invented that word a few thousand years ago.

People seem so interested in the Jewish point of view about things. They’re always checking stuff with us, watching what we do, curious about our reactions, and yes, holding us to account. You know, we make up less than one fifth of one percent of the world’s population. You wouldn’t think it would matter so much what we think!

Jews have always seen things differently. We tell the true story of the great clock tower in the city of Prague. The old Jewish ghetto there faced the rear of the tower so its inhabitants watched the clock run backwards. The elders of the community finally got smart, climbed up and put Hebrew letters where the numbers go so now the backwards clock made sense. We are an adaptive people.

Our most well-known thinkers have always been individuals who thought outside of the box. Albert Einstein developing the theory of relativity. Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious; the courageous pantheism of Baruch Spinoza; the rebellious Emma Goldman fighting for workers’ rights; the dream and vision of Theodore Herzl for the necessity of a Jewish homeland some fifty years before the Holocaust.

But if there is any one element of Jewish thinking that transcends generations it is that we have never been satisfied with only the surface meaning of anything. We are not a linear people; and we have never stopped the conversation with only one voice being heard. We are the people of one God, and 13 million theologies, 2 Jews, 3 opinions. We brought nuance into the world. We do not go long and shallow, we go short and deep.

This summer was a painful one for the Jewish people. Israel attacked viciously with Hamas rockets and terror tunnels burrowing under Jewish homes, Israelis running for cover as sirens wailed; the targeting of Hamas operatives and weapons launching locations resulting in the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians. The combined anguish of losing Israeli soldiers and being tagged worldwide as murderers of innocents fell heavily on Israelis and Jews worldwide.

Even as the Syrian civil war death toll climbed into the hundreds of thousands, and the Islamic State slaughtered everyone in its path en route to the establishment of a brutal new Caliphate; and even as the world acknowledged that Hamas militants in Gaza were waging their war from schools, apartments and city centers, intentionally using civilian shields, the condemnatory eyes of the world turned most prominently to Israel. Anti-Semitic incidents broke out in Europe with cries for Jewish blood such as we have not heard since the Second World War. College campuses saw heated demonstrations. The International Presbyterian Church voted boycott/divestment/sanction initiatives against the state of Israel. The world turned Israeli selfdefense into a war crime; the UN investigated Israel, but curiously not Hamas.

What seemed strikingly familiar was the level of scrutiny the Jewish people still draws. Disproportionate to the extent of tragedies around the world, the critical eye was on Israel.

Why is this? I believe the very reason we are listened to, scrutinized, and held to a higher standard is because of the very hallowed Jewish traditions of negotiation, conciliation, compromise, and deliberation. We have always been a people internally and externally that seeks to listen to other voices and not squelch dissenting opinions.

Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, is made up of 120 seats representing Ultra-Orthodox religious parties, secular voices, the right wing Likkud, Israeli Arabs, centrists, and Labor, to name only a few. Some voices make more noise than others or wield more power, but this singular democracy in the Middle East demands that all voices have their say.

One of the greatest gifts of the Jewish people to the world, dating back to biblical times, was a system of justice for civilized nations. Courts of law, jury trials, fair and considered judiciaries to ensure just democratic societies.

The Torah states that among the first things to be established in the new land are the Arei miklat - cities for an accused killer to flee to until he has had his day in court to prevent exactly the kind of heated reaction that our animal instincts often lead us to do.

And thus one of the most disturbing moments this summer was the horrific revenge killing of the Palestinian youth. When the three Yeshiva students were abducted and slain and Israel’s enemies the world over danced in the streets with joy, no one seemed particularly surprised. But Jews doing such things? In a single deed, the complexities of justice, rationality and diplomacy were thrust aside. Revenge, Jewish tradition teaches us, never works. Revenge is the most surface and least nuanced of reactions. Brute emotional force with not an ounce of justice.

The events of this summer witnessed an ever growing division within the Jewish people. Our history demonstrates over and over that the greatest danger to the Jewish people comes not from without, but from within. When we stop listening to the diverse and multifaceted voices within our tradition and see only one side of an issue, or hang out only with people who share our world view we bring disaster upon ourselves.

The story of the binding of Isaac we read this morning features a much repeated phrase – vayelchu sh’neyhem yachdav – “and the two of them traveled on together”. This phrase is said so often we must gather that no great Jewish journey is done solo.

As Abraham lifts his knife to silence the other atop that lonely mountain, the angel calls out: stay your hand! Never – slay – the – other voice. L’chu sh’neychem yachdav. Walk together. Talk together. Dwell, argue, deliberate, but do it together.

Note that the greatest enemies of justice out there in our world today are quite literally “slayers of the other voice”. They do it viciously. They video tape it, put it on line and attempt to bully us with it. There is no law but theirs. There is no freedom. There is no democracy. There is no other voice.

Jews divided by hatred and anger is called sinat chinam. Literally “senseless hatred”. The problem is not our having strong ideas, or even disagreeing, but dismissing other people’s ideas as heresy. The downfall of the Jewish people has been linked time and again to our inability to see another Jew’s point of view.

With all the lessons and values the Jewish people have brought the world, perhaps the most important is the one of which we now must remind ourselves. We may have differing views on issues, but our lack of uniformity must never lead to a lack of unity.

The power and influence of our voice cannot hide the fact that there are only 13 million of us worldwide and we need to be forthright and intentional with our Jewish voices. But it has never been in our best interest to squelch opinions other than our own. The last thing a Jew should do is to slay the other Jewish voice. There is an ancient tale about the great sage Rabbi Akiva and his 12,000 pairs of students, (they studied in pairs so as always to be in the presence of another voice or potential dissenting opinion) All of them were taught Akiva’s most basic law: What is hateful to you, do not allow for your neighbor. Talmudic tradition tells the bizarre story of how the 12,000 pairs of students all learned this lesson, but in the heat of their debate over the law promptly forgot it, so that angry argument prevailed and they were consumed by a plague.

That’s an ancient rabbi story. Here’s a modern rabbi story. At this season rabbis all over the globe are attempting to bring messages of hope and peace to their congregations. In one case in New York a Rabbi cautioned her congregation not to harden their hearts to Palestinian deaths, and a board member posted on Facebook his resignation from the synagogue claiming the rabbi was spreading Hamas propaganda.

Conversely, my cousin’s rabbi in Montreal preached a sermon detailing how Israel had indeed lived up to the highest standards of Jewish ethics in wartime, and immediately heard from several members who were quitting because they felt there was no room to express their criticism of Israel. A Midwestern conservative rabbi was rejected from a position at a temple because he told the interviewing committee that he didn’t think there was just one Jewish point of view on Israel. Another rabbi’s board put a note in her contract indicating that she is forbidden to speak about Israel at all. A young colleague of ours locally preached about Israel this summer and was lambasted from all sides of the political spectrum with angry emails and threatened resignations. I told her I thought it was brave of her to address the subject, even though I didn’t entirely agree with her conclusion, but when you speak publicly such responses are hazards of the profession. But she said the lesson she learned was pure and simple. Never preach about Israel. I thought that was sad.

The danger of sinat chinam, internal fighting and division, is insidious and it is real – a civilization, a people, that loses its ability to speak to each other as sane adults, a community that rejects the Jewish gift of nuance, of subtlety and detail, and pulls itself into an a singular point of view that doesn’t allow for another is a threat to our national existence. The very thing that keeps Israel strong and the Jewish people vibrant is our willingness and readiness to engage with each other in a constructive manner.

The Jewish year is now officially 5775. That’s a symmetrical number – the first in 110 years. Its symmetry makes it much like a mirror, and mirrors cause us both to look at ourselves as well as to see things from a slightly different perspective. This is what keeps us human. Wrapped within the saddest of stories from this summer was perhaps the most beautiful lessons of our shared national experience. One of the first reported Israeli casualties this summer was that of a soldier Nissim Shawn Carmeli, a young man who made aliyah from the state of Texas to the State of Israel.

Nissim was what was called a lone soldier, meaning that he had no immediate relatives living in Israel. But Nissim (and that name means “miracle” turned out to be anything but lone soldier because by definition the Jewish people never leave each other alone. Some 20,000 Israelis attended this Nissim’s funeral. He gave his life for the Jewish state. But he was never alone.

I pray that this year will be more a more peaceful one than the last. Harmony and peace always begins with the act of listening to one another. Speaking passionately but allowing, in the great Jewish tradition, each voice to be heard. To heed the message of the angel atop mount Moriah at a critical juncture in ancient Jewish history.

Withhold your hand.

Do not slay the other voice.

Yom Kippur: Woe Is Not Us

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2013/5774

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erev Yom Kippur: I’ll Meet You Halfway

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2012/5773

There is a pretty well known story of a tailor name of Schneider who despite his excellent stitching, his fine clothing alterations, just can’t seem to make a buck. Around the High Holy Days he goes to the rabbi and asks what he can possibly do to make his business flourish. The rabbi responds with a very “Yom Kippur” message telling him that he must make God his partner, and then all his endeavors will meet with great success. Well, years pass and it seems that Schneider has all but disappeared, until one day the rabbi sees him pull up to Shul in a Rolls Royce. Astounded, the rabbi asks him what happened. “Why, I took your advice rabbi,” said Schneider. “I made God my partner and boom, the business took off, I’m a success, huge clothing stores all over the country, look there goes one of my trucks right now! The rabbi looked up and sure enough Lord and Taylor.

We tend to think that God can do most things by God’s self. But there is much proof of God’s dependence on us. In the first 5 days of creation God went by the name of Elohim, and all that existed during that time were birds and trees and land and quaking earth and mud sliding mountains and flooding waters and hot sun and chilling winds and you name it.

On the sixth day, when our species was created, we started calling God Adonai. Elohim is the God of the spinning natural world – a world of beautiful landscapes, flowering fields, oceans rich and teeming with life, and also the natural spinning world that has brought floods, earthquakes, parched lands that yield no produce, others that have plenty, hurricanes that knock down houses and put cities underwater. But Elohim, you should know, however, is not the God of hunger, for there has been created enough to eat.

Adonai is the God that calls out for partnership when such things occur. Adonai is the small voice inside of each of us that says: Looks like the boss needs help. And, Adonai is the God that calls out to us like God did in the story of Cain and Abel and says: the bloods of your brothers cry out from the ground. When human being attacks fellow human being, God cries out for partnership.

This partnership idea is very much a Yom Kippur theme, and other stories come to mind. One, of course, is the book of Jonah, read tomorrow afternoon. We know about the big fish, but some of us still get Jonah confused with Gepetto. Do we really understand what Jonah is about?

It isn’t really about the fish. The book of Jonah is about a God who’s looking for a good partner to help straighten up a lot of evil people who live in the city of Nineveh. It is God’s desire that people better themselves. That we pull ourselves out of the great depths and embrace better behavior. Jonah is a very reluctant, unwilling partner. Called to service Jonah flees as far away from God as he believes a person can possibly go. Down to the seaside, down into a boat, down into the hull of the boat. Over the side and down into the ocean. Down into the belly of a fish. He obviously confuses the direction of lowness with being distant from his would be employer. Jonah is content to reject God’s offer of partnership.

Eventually Jonah gets with the program, but he never really understands his partnership with God. Maybe that’s because God didn’t put it to him the right way. God yanked Jonah out of bed one night and made him take on a completely new task. Did God meet Jonah halfway?

Maybe one of the reasons Jonah had no desire to forgive others was because he had no ability to forgive himself for something. Maybe he simply felt that he was beyond redemption. The biblical book never informs us what he may have done, but something tells me he felt so guilty about his own behavior that he held everyone else to that same standard, one they could not possibly meet. Maybe we need to sort things out for ourselves before we can be of any use to others. There is certainly no record of God trying to find out what was in Jonah’s heart. No attempt to meet him halfway.

Jewish mysticism teaches us that the balance of the entire universe rests on our ability to make that partnership work. It begins on this Holy day, by coming clean with your partner, then collaborating on a plan to make the world work better. Partnership always involves meeting the other person halfway.

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav told the story of the prince who went insane and insisted he was a rooster. He sat on under the table naked, clucking and eating his food off the floor. The king had tried everything to cure him, but nothing worked, and he was in despair. How could this mad son of his ever grow up to inherit the kingdom?

Then a wise old Jewish man, a rebbe arrived and said he could cure the prince. The king was desperate, so he said, "OK, fine, go ahead, I'll try anything..."

So the rebbe took off his clothes and sat under the table, pretending to be a chicken, too. The king was totally shocked. No doubt he had expected the old man to argue with the prince or try to verbally beat it out of him. But the Rebbe knew what he was doing. And so, sitting there under the table, he got to know the Rooster Prince.

Then one day, the Rebbe called for a pair of pants and began putting them on. The Rooster Prince objected, saying, "What do you mean, wearing those pants? You're a rooster -- a rooster can't wear pants!"

"Who says a rooster can't wear pants?" the Rebbe replied. "Why shouldn't I be warm and comfortable, too? Why should the humans have all the good things?"

The Rooster Prince thought about this for a while. The floor under the table was very cold and uncomfortable. So he asked for pants, too, and put them on.

The next day, the Rebbe asked for a warm shirt, and began to put it on. Again the Rooster Prince objected: "How can you do that? You are a rooster -- a rooster doesn't wear a shirt!"

"Who says so?" said the Rebbe. "Why shouldn't I have a fine shirt, too? Why should I have to shiver in the cold, just because I'm a rooster?" Again the Rooster Prince thought about it for a while, and realized that he was cold, too -- so he put on a shirt. And so it went with socks, shoes, a belt, a hat... Soon the Rooster Prince was talking normally, eating with a knife and fork from a plate, sitting properly at the table -- in short, he was acting human once more. Not long after that, he was pronounced completely cured.

There was no way to convince this prince other than meeting him halfway. So too, in our lives, when we want to influence someone’s behavior we have to know who they are and what makes them tick first. Then we join in a partnership to create a new relationship, even to create a new human being. And the beauty of it is that in doing so we find that we ourselves become more sensitive and loving and easier to get along with.

So, as we prepare this YK to forgive others and to ask others for forgiveness, we may want to take a few minutes alone and forgive ourselves. We have to believe we are worthy of a partnership with God and with each other.

And then as we seek to improve our relations with those whom we love, may we take the time to understand what makes them who they are, and learn better ways of communicating with them in ways they understand.

Perhaps the point of the next 24 hours, before the gates close at Neilah tomorrow evening is to learn to present ourselves as willing partners and very precious co-workers for a better world.