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: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2018/5779

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have many more stories like that. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what do we do?

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

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

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

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…

Kol Nidre: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2017/5778

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

Yom Kippur: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Barry Cytron
2017/5778

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

Yom Kippur: It’s Not About the Bloodline

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2017/5778

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Barry Cytron
2017/5778

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

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.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2017/5778

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

Yom Kippur: Misrepresentation

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2016/5777

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yom Kippur: Forgiveness

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2016/5777

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t pretend to know

The challenges we’re facing

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

And you need time

Just let me stay here by your side

And we learn that for Eliza: 

There is a grace too powerful to name

We push away what we can never understand

We push away the unimaginable

She takes his hand 

And they find their way back to one another. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[v] Ibd.

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.

Rosh HaShanah: Watching Our Words

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2016/5777

“The time has come

The walrus said

To talk of many things:

Of shoes- and ships-

And sealing wax-

Of cabbages and kings-

And why the sea is boiling hot-

And whether pigs have wings.”  

With words such as these we are pulled into Lewis Carroll's famous book, Alice and Wonderland, in which Carroll so vividly paints a mystical magical world for us through the use of his pithy phrases, short anecdotes and even, gibberish.  We follow as Alice, bored with the conversation of grown-ups, finds a topsy-turvy, upside down universe filled with entertainment and adventure.

As a little girl, I loved to escape behind the looking glass with Alice.  I was introduced to these stories by my grandfather.  Still a man of few—but powerful—words, he has always connected best through the wit and wisdom of books.  Whenever we were together, we had a nighttime ritual.  Once I was in bed he would come into my room and tell me a story.  Using the characters from Alice and Wonderland, he created an imaginary world and sent Alice, with me as her sidekick, on an adventure.  I could not help but be enchanted by the reality he created.

On one of my recent visits to my grandparent’s home I found Carroll's book amongst the vast array of volumes overflowing my grandfather's shelves.  I picked it up and began to read.  I was quickly reminded of Carroll’s brilliance and his mastery of the English language.  His riddles stay with us as their logic, combined with their whimsical nature, reverberates in our minds.  It is his creative genius and wordplay that keeps us engaged in the story.  Words have that power.  They have the ability not only to impart information but also to engage, motivate and transform. 

The great speeches of our time are remembered for more than the speaker's personality or charisma.  They are remembered for the anecdotes that speak to our hearts and endure in our minds.  “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” “I have a dream.”  I get chills just thinking about these words that marked such astonishing human achievements -  the celebration of space exploration, a President summoning us to be our best selves, and the greatest civil rights leader challenging the status quo.  They are motivational and inspirational.  They move us to act, they propel us forward, they enable us to envision a brighter future and bring that vision to reality. These are words that have the strength to inspire us to action.     

Our Jewish tradition understands the power of words.  In just a few weeks we will begin the Torah anew with these words: “Bereshit barah elohim et hashamayim v’et haratz. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)    God spoke and the world was created.  It is through God’s words that the world came into being.  With words we humans also create.  When a new couple stands beneath the wedding chuppah excited and nervous to begin their lives together, they exchange vows - Harei at mekudeshet li - that bind their lives together.  With their words they build a family.  For any of us who have had the privilege and the honor of witnessing this moment we can feel its power, its exhilaration, its hope.  In that moment we witness creation.

Words, however, also have the ability to harm.  We have all been at the other end of a snide remark, a hurtful comment, and a bad joke.  We all know that the nursery rhyme “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” is far from true.  Words hurt, a lot.  They get under our skin and attach to our soul. We carry harmful words around with us like bricks weighing us down.  They make us look at ourselves differently.  They deflate our confidence and cause us to question our being.  Now, more than ever, it seems we cannot escape the critical words that aim to tear us down.  They are everywhere.  They are on our many screens, in our pockets, at work and sometimes even at home. 

Do you know that there are people today who are surfing the Internet with the sole purpose of criticizing others?  They are called trolls, which is Internet slang for a person who sows discord by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community. Factors like anonymity and a lack of authority strip away the morals that we as a society have spent millennia building, giving people the freedom to attack others.  They use social media to perform pranks, harass and threaten their victims.   

This is not a new issue or a new concern.  Entire books have been written on the dangers of having an evil tongue.  The Torah refers to the slander as lashon hara - derogatory speech about another person.  The prohibition against this is found twice in the Torah, both in the third book, the book of Leviticus.  “You will not go up and down as a tale-bearer among thy people” (Lev. 19:16), “You shall not wrong one another with speech” (Lev. 25:17).  The Talmud teaches us that the act of lashon hara kills three people - the person who speaks it, the person who hears it and the person about whom it is told.  In fact, the rabbis went as far as to say that slander, tale bearing, and evil talk are worse than the three cardinal sins of murder, immorality, and idolatry.  In truth, it is with words that we can affect others to the point of causing these latter three offences.

This is why sins committed with our words hold a central place in our confessions on Yom Kippur.  Of the 43 sins enumerated in the Al Cheit confession recited on Yom Kippur, 11 are sins committed through speech. According to Jewish tradition the tongue is the most dangerous of all instruments.  For this reason it must be kept hidden from view, behind the two protective walls of the lips and teeth, in order to prevent its misuse.

I would argue that our lips and our teeth are not doing their job these days.  The words that we are hearing from our pre-school children to our politicians are mean and alarming.  This summer I was at Camp TEKO sitting with a first grade group as they ate their snack when I heard one camper say to another, “Donald Trump is racist and hates woman.”  The camper responded “Hillary Clinton is a liar and a cheater.”  While it would be unwise to underestimate the aptitude of Camp TEKO first graders, I am fairly certain that our campers did not come up with these assessments on their own.  They were merely repeating what they heard around the kitchen table.  While they may not fully understand the words they are saying, they do know they are unkind. 

We have come very far from the debates over the white picket fence author Bill Bishop describes in his book, The Big Sort. He writes that although “America is more diverse than ever coast to coast, the places where we live are becoming increasingly crowded with people who live, think, and vote like we do. We've built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood and church and news show — most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation. Our country has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred, that people don't know and can't understand those who live just a few miles away.” This trend is apparent in the way in which we speak to one another about the topics over which we disagree. 

This year’s political discourse has been characterized by a certain coarseness and demeaning quality.  Instead of news that teaches us about the merit or problems with each candidate’s policy suggestions, we are reading and hearing personal attacks on politicians themselves. And we, as private citizens, are repeating and perpetuating these campaign smears while also applying our judgment to our peers.  We are attacking each other for our political opinions. I regularly see Facebook posts threatening to end friendships over politics. We question the intelligence and sanity of those with whom we disagree. We are using our words to attack one another’s very being. We are judging people’s souls based on their political leanings.  We are assuming that because their thoughts differ from ours they are evil, malicious and going to cause the destruction of the country. We have replaced listening with judging.

Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Listen Israel Adonai is our God, Adonai is one.  Listen Israel.  These are the words that Jews are commanded to say each time we pray, they are the words that our on our lips when we go to sleep at night.  They are on the doorposts of our home. We teach them to our children. They are the last words we say before we die. These words teach us to pay attention. We are not just to let the sounds pass by our ears. We are to use the skill of listening, not just the physical ability to hear, which not all of us have. Yet, we can all listen to the words being communicated to us, whether it be through speech, sign language or the written word. In fact, listening, paying attention, Sh'miat Haozen, is one of the virtues we are to aspire to. When we are committed to attentive listening we have the ability to understand and learn from one another.  

The Torah is full of times when God is trying to get our attention. “Listen well, O heavens, and I will speak.” (Deuteronomy 32:1)– only if we are paying attention will God talk to us. This idea of listening is of utmost importance in the Torah. Torah does not mince words.  Tradition tells us that every word is used for a purpose. It is no accident that we are commanded time and again to pay attention. The Israelites were not very good at listening. They rarely understood what was being communicated to them. Instead, they interrupted with their list of grievances. Too often, we are like the ancient Israelites. 

If we are honest with ourselves we know that we don’t listen very well. And when we do, we are often listening for what we want to hear. We have made a decision about what the other person will say and we are biding our time, waiting for when we can interject with our own opinion, or discredit the speaker with a counterpoint. Rarely do we slow down enough to ask questions, to dig deeper, and to understand another’s point of view and core values.  Rarely do we hear, let alone look for, the truths that differ from our own assumptions or understandings.  Rather than using our conversation to learn something new, we use them to convince others of our side.  All too often this leads to yelling and arguing, instead of listening and understanding.  

We all know how much better we feel when others pay attention to us. This is when we feel most valued, most understood, most important. It is also when we are most able to listen to another’s point of view. It is in this duality that we are able to find common ground where our paths, our passions and our concerns meet and where we can find solutions that were never imagined.    

As hard as it is to choose our words carefully, it is even harder to listen to those with which we disagree. Game of Thrones is a TV series, based on a book, that shows the best and worst of humanity. It happens to be much too gory for me, but I still can’t stop watching when Mike has it on! There are characters in it that are so despicable it hard not to root for their destruction. Then there are others whose wisdom far exceeds their position or stature. One such character, who happens to be my personal favorite, Tyrion Lannister, remarked: “We make peace with our enemies, not our friends.” Guarding our tongue and listening attentively are two crucial skills to living together amongst families and within communities. 

In a conversation with the Mad Hatter, Alice begins a sentence “I don’t think…” Before she has a chance to finish the Hatter jumps in with: “Then you should not speak.” This of course frustrates Alice to no end, for the Hatter is clearly not listening to her. In fact, in many ways it is the lack of listening that propels the story of Alice forward. But, in this instance, it is not the art of listening that the Mad Hatter is trying to teach us. He wants Alice to realize that she is not choosing her words carefully. So often we don’t think, but we do speak. We speak out of anger and frustration; we speak out of boredom or to fill the silence. We use our words without discretion. In so doing, we forget the power we have to create and to destroy.  Instead, we view speech as a credit line with no limit, rather than the most valuable possession we have. And the value of our credit is plummeting. 

It is time for us to take back the importance of speech and relearn the art of listening. It is time for us to work toward understanding one another. Our words, once released, are like an arrow. They cannot be recalled; the harm they do cannot be contained. Just as the feathers in the well-known parable cannot be put back into the pillow once they have been shaken out into the wind, our words have a tendency to fly away to places unknown where we are unable to collect them and the damage they do cannot be undone. But, as is said in Proverbs, kind words are like honey, they are sweet to the soul and healing to the body. They promote kindness and compassion. 

Therefore, as we celebrate this New Year, we have a choice to make. Will we use our speech to heal or to harm? Will we speak rashly like the thrust of a sword or bring healing with the wise tongue? Will we use our words to light fires in our minds or to wring tears from our eyes? And to whom will each of us commit to listen? Whose opinion will we try to better understand? Whose fears will we begin to acknowledge? Now is our chance to change the conversation. For:

“The time has come

The walrus said

To talk of many things”

Shana Tova

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.

Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2016/5777

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

Yom Kippur: Who I Want to Be

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2015/5776

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My differential was 37 points.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L’shana tova.

Yom Kippur: The Blessing of Failure

Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2015/5776

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2015/5776

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

Erev Yom Kippur: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2015/5776

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

Erev 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.