Erev Rosh Hashanah 5770 Δ
I would love to introduce you to Mr. Mandel. When I was little, Morris Mandel walked large. Not tall in height, Mr. Mandel scraped the sky in stature even though he topped out at only five foot three inches.
Avuncular, educated, opinionated, somewhat old world even after years in the United States, Morris Mandel was someone to notice.
He was what we would call a presence.
He also had some well-known traits among our community.
For example, he would use the Manchester (NH) Union Leader to line his refrigerator--but would always cut out the across-the-front page headline that encouraged the readership to "Worship at the church of your choice" before using it. That didn't bother him, but the two crosses did.
He was a serious davener, too.
He was part of the community that made-up Temple Israel in "the other Manchester" in New Hampshire.
To be sure Mr. Mandel was there every Shabbos.
And you could expect to see him at shul every day, for Mr. Mandel was a regular minyan goer.
There he was with the others --and like almost all daily minyans back then they were mostly men and mostly of a certain vintage.
Each person would come in, don tallis and tefillan (if it was morning), and take the same seat, day in and out. The praying would begin.
The davening done, the siddurim put away, there would always be a short time for socialization over a little piece cake, a cup coffee, maybe some nice herring.
It was some good thing.
Just as importantly each day they expected to see each other. They would kibbitz. Ask about each other's children. Grouse about the latest health set-back. Make plans to get together.
Then it was off to the day until the next meeting at shul.
Now if you were retelling this story you would think that it is a story about a man who went to the daily minyan in Manchester, New Hampshire. You would be partially right.
It is also something much more.
It is about what sustains us--in addition to prayer.
While daily prayer was ostensibly the purpose of the daily minyan, unstated and never far below the surface was this:
Friendship. Enduring friendship.
Mr. Mandel lived to old age--and did so with his friends, the other individuals who he saw and engaged with on a daily basis for years and years.
Gathering to pray was an opportunity to share their lives, not over the phone, but face to face.
When one person did not show up--and had not let others know ahead of time--they worried and got in touch.
As a youngster, I always thought it was the davening, the praying that kept these minyan goers alive.
It certainly contributed to their longevity.
It was not, however, the only factor in play.
The connections they had with one another held them together in life. These are not the connections of lovers or spouses, but of friends.
That friendship has a role in sustaining people’s well being beyond the pleasures of friendship is only recently being explored more thoroughly by researchers.
They are discovering that friendships keep people alive, sustain them, and affect their well-being in both overt and subtle ways.
And what is our ICM community if not a community of caring, a community of friendships? In our Manchester and environs one can quite regularly hear about the various degrees of friendships that are formed and expanded through connections made in and among our congregation.
No matter what your beliefs are about religious matters, being part of a religious community is good for one's existence when it comes to creating friendships that matter.
For it is in these friendships that the tools for sustaining life are found.
Religion itself is based on creating connections.
Rabbi Elliot Dorff writes that etymologically the word "religion" comes from the root word for linkages meaning "to tie or to bind" similar to root of the word "ligament".
Ligament is part of the human body that ties together bones. It allows us to remain cohesive within our bodies, holding firm and also allowing motion.
Judaism as we practice it here at ICM is like ligament: holding us together and allowing us to live our lives with friends. Shared stories. Shared celebrations. Shared comforting. Shared experiences.
For some time I have thought about the value of friendship. It is just recently that those who study social organization have been able to conclude that friendship is more than meets the eyes.
Reports the New York Times: "In the quest for better health many people overlook a powerful weapon that could help them fight illness and depression, speed recovery, slow aging and prolong life: their friends."
The story cites wide-ranging studies from around the world such as:
· A 10-year Australian study found that 22% of older adults with a large circle of friends were less likely to die during the study period
· A Harvard study found that strong social ties promotes brain health
· A 2006 study of nurses with breast cancer found that those without close friends were four times as likely to die as those who did have close friends
Complementing these studies are the experiences of friends who have known each other for 40 years and now live in eight different states. These women are the subject of Jeffrey Zaslow's book "The Women from Ames."
Through illnesses and deaths, marriages and divorces, and all that is entailed in living life these women have friendships that sustain them. This book speaks to the truths that these friends feel about each other and a truth that we share: we need our friends--and they need us.
Most of us are familiar with what Judaism requires of us for taking care of the sick, for caring for people in need, for doing mitzvot that promote health and wellbeing.
What does it tell us about maintaining life-affirming and potentially extending friendships?
In the strongest possible ways our tradition lauds friends and friendships.
We are instructed from the Mishnah, circa 200 CE to "Find yourself a friend." It is a direct command to embrace another human being as a friend as we journey through life.
The Babylonian Talmud tells us: R. Joshua ben Levi said: One who sees a friend after a lapse of thirty days should say "Blessed be YHVH who has kept us alive, preserved us, and brought us to this season." (B. Ber 58b)
Yes, the words of the shecheyanu are to be used when reuniting with a friend after a period of absence. And what does the shecheyanu celebrate? Sustenance and life.
In the Book of Job it is written: "One who entreats God's mercy for his fellow while he himself is in need of the same thing will be answered first, for it is said, ‘The Eternal changed the fortune of Job when he prayed for his friend’” (Job 42:10)
Job, the book that deals with God's seeming capriciousness in dealing with the human creation, powerfully motivates God to act because of the caring Job exhibits for his friend.
Given how Judaism honors and values friendship it should come as no surprise that God is considered our friend, called our “y’did nefesh”, our soul mate.
This is a time and place for connecting with faces that we know.
In seeing each other, we are reminded, as a prominent Jewish thinker posits, that we are responsible for one another just by virtue of seeing the face of the other.
That is who we are.
The name of our congregation is not "Temple" Israel. We are Kehilat Israel, Israel Congregation. Our name is who we are, a place of meeting faces, of engaging friends.
Taken to a higher (or more profound) level our relating holds within it the potential for friendships that aid in extending and enhancing life while also promoting wellness.
The Times article concludes "Friendship is an undervalued resource. The consistent message of these studies is that friends make your life better."
We are at the time of year when our regular greetings, like Shabbat Shalom, are replaced with joyful "happy new years" or "L'shanah tovah!" We want for our friends a year that is good, abundant in blessings, full of life and love.
Our prayers are couched in the "Book of Life"--we pray that we are all written for good in the new year, that whatever may be in store for us, it is good.
We should also add that we want to written in the book of life for friendship.
Mr. Mandel's longevity may have been because of his genes. Or it may be that he had deep and abiding friendships.
We are here as a community where we encounter our friends.
To them and to you:
A good year.
A sweet new year.
A year of blessings.
And
Most of all, a year of sustained friendships that in the words of the Shecheyanu: keep us alive, preserve us, and bring us to this season.
Kol Nidre 5770 Δ
Suffering is the bane of the human experience.
There is not a person alive who embraces suffering for suffering's sake.
Fortunately, Judaism as I understand it, does not value suffering as a religious virtue. Just the opposite. Would that our values could alleviate human suffering.
All of us who are privileged to experience life's wonders and awesomeness are also burdened, at one time or another, to experience suffering in all of its manifestations.
The question of suffering is often boiled down to one word:
Why.
Why do humans suffer.
Why do we live with physical and psychic pain.
Why do we encounter illnesses both curable and chronic.
Why do we have to watch people we love suffer and feel unable to do anything about it.
Why.
It is not wrong to ask why. Even though the answer is elusive, the pain of suffering causes such disruption that we are often left with our questions, if not answers.
There is another question.
Who.
As in "who causes suffering."
Did I do something that made this happen?
Am I being punished?
Did someone do this to me?
There are more causes for suffering than we could count. It makes finding an answer one of those who questions elusive or wishful thinking.
And then there is God.
The complexity of our relationships with God is no more visible than when we or someone we love is suffering.
Like much of life's mysteries, our Judaism is a place where we go with unanswerable questions. There are mysteries to life but it does not mean that when suffering occurs we are so willing to embrace them.
This manifests in two ways: blaming God or embracing God--or dare I say: doing both.
How many of you have said or heard this question:
Why is God doing this to me?
It may be a question that reflects the person's true outlook that their suffering comes from God. Or it might be a person grappling with the unknowing that comes from an illness or emotional pain and losing their language, unable to frame a cogent question about causality. The pain drives them back to the most basic of words.
Still the question is uttered--and it is not a new question. Why God?
This same profound question is recorded and preserved in our sacred texts. You can hear the aching of our ancestors living with their pain and the estrangement it caused them to experience:
Their suffering led them to feel abandoned.
My God, I cry by day--You answer not; by night and have no respite.
Their suffering led them to feel unheard.
Why, O Lord, do you stand aloof heedless in times of trouble?
Their suffering led them to feel punished:
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Oh Eternal One: Do not punish me in anger, do not chastise me in fury. Have mercy on me, O God, for I languish; heal me, O God, for my bones shake with terror.
Their suffering led them to feel rejected by God:
Why, O Lord, do You reject me, do You hide Your face from me?
Their suffering stole their voices:
I cry aloud to God; I cry to God that He may give ear to me. In my time of distress I turn to the Eternal with my hand uplifted; my eyes flow all night without respite; I will not be comforted. I call God to mind, I moan, I complain, my spirit fails.
Abandoned, unheard, persecuted, rejected, voiceless. A broken relationship, completely.
Their pain is our pain when we suffer. Their feelings are known to us because we have experienced them in our own ways.
The pain of suffering runs through the human experience as a thoroughly annihilating force and God does not ameleorite it.
Our ancestors felt powerfully in their suffering. God was culpable.
The sages our tradition venerates from the Talmud wondered this as well. Did suffering come from God? And if it did, what purpose could it possibly serve?
A story speaks of a learned rabbi who suffered terribly with a terminal illness. This rabbi was pious, studied and taught Torah, and lived a life that was much revered by his colleagues and his students. Yet he was dying. Encountered by a colleague, another equally renown rabbi and scholar, he was asked if the suffering and the reward was worth it.
The suffering rabbi replied: neither the suffering nor the reward.
We understand he was suffering--he had a terminal illness. What reward was he speaking of?
In those days the only plausible answer to the pain of suffering was that God had some reward for the sufferer in the world to come because there could be nothing in this world to compensate for suffering's intensity.
Coupled with that, the sufferer was believed to have done something in this world that caught God's attention and the suffering was sent by God as an "affliction of God's love".
Suffering as an affliction of love? What kind of love is that?
This is a love that was believed to be one that demonstrated God's caring and closeness to the individual by causing him or her to suffer.
What is so stunning about this story is that the learned rabbis thoroughly reject the notion that human suffering is an act of God's love or an indication of a reward in some future world.
Then, as now, suffering is not understood as a reward or a punishment, and if it was thought to derive directly from God, it was rejected.
For those of us here tonight who are suffering in any way know please that your suffering is not a gift or a reward from God. It is not in suffering that I wish to encounter God. It is not in suffering that I wish you to encounter God.
The voices of the Psalms and the voices of the rabbis blend with ours today over the generations. We ask the same questions, often of God.
There is another side of the story of our Talmudic rabbis and those who came before and after them who assigning blame to God for suffering.
When God is blamed as the cause we are, knowingly or unknowingly, also driving God out of any other possibility.
We are driving away God can be a comfort to us.
We are driving away God that can make us feel less alone.
We are driving away God that can offer some measure of comfort amidst our incessant pain.
When we encounter God when we suffer we have within us the opportunity to encounter God with the whole range of what we are feeling, the good, the terrible, the blame, the comfort. God is not one-size-fits all for the blame. God can handle whatever you have to experience.
Just don't push God away.
Invite God into our struggles with suffering. In the Torah it says that we human beings are created in God's image, as a reflection of God. If that is so then it is fair to say by logical inference that if those created in God's image are suffering then God suffers with us.
We are not alone.
God can handle your anger.
God can handle your blame.
God can handle your resignation.
God can handle your not knowing or understanding.
What God cannot handle is your absenting yourself from God.
God needs humans.
When we suffer, we need God to be there for us in whatever way we understand God.
Over these 24 hours of Yom Kippur we will pray to this God to be merciful and compassionate, that mercy and compassion overwhelm any desire to judge us in any way that is damaging to us.
Adonai, Adonai, a God full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in mercy and truth; keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving inquity, transgression and sin; and acquitting.
In simple terms: we ask God to be there for us.
After spending considerable time seeking forgiveness, we put forward a request toward the end of the Yom Kippur Amidah that I hold close to me throughout the year:
Our Parent, Our Sovereign, remember Your mercy and suppress Your anger, and remove pestilence, sword and famine, destruction, captivity, iniquity and plague, all evil occurrences, and every disease, stumbling-block and contention, every kind of punishment, every evil decree and all causeless enmity, from us and from all the children of Your covenant.
Whatever power God does have--keep us from suffering.
Reduce our suffering.
Know that we are not alone in our suffering.
This, too, is expressed in the words of our ancestors in the Psalms:
Ps 30 3: O Lord my God, I cried out to You and You healed me.
Ps 71-21: You will turn and comfort me.
And in Psalm 90, a phrase that succinctly notes that we are given ample suffering--give us joy in equal amounts:
Ps 90-15: Give us joy for as long as You have afflicted us, for the years we have suffered misfortune.
Finally, a benediction, from Psalm 20, words that resonate today as the day they were first put on the page:
May God answer you in time of trouble, the name of Jacob's God keep you safe.
May the Eternal send you help from the sanctuary and sustain you from Zion.
May the Eternal grant you your desire and fulfill your every plan.
May we shout for joy in your victory, arrayed by standards in the name of our God.
May the Eternal fulfill your every wish.
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5769 Δ
The Stakes- Rabbi David Novak
May you be written for good.
L'Shana tovah tikateivu: That is our wonderful Jewish greeting where we share with each other our aspirations for a year that is happy, to be sure--- and also for a year that is infused with meaning and saturated with blessings.
It is also an aspiration that the world that continues on its natural course might be shaped in ways large and small by what actions we consciously choose to take.
Tikkun Olam is perhaps Judaism's best-known religious precept. This is the concept of repairing the world. Both the world--and the repairs it always needs--are large, much larger than any one human being or group of human beings can comprehend.
Which is why Tikkun Olam is not given to us as Jews as an option. We do not get a choice as to whether or not to participate in the repair of the world:
Tikkun Olam is an ethos, an all-encompassing mandate derived from our religious value to create a world worthy of God and our place in it. The idea is in every worship service, in the Aleinu, where we pray that we will create a "taken olam l'malchut shaddai: to repair the world for God's sovereignty."
Our religious values do not let remain acceptable what is.
Our religious values always promote what can be, what should be.
Which is why I am asking you tonight as we begin 5769 to consider the choices you will be making this fall to be of the highest importance, as a citizen of the United States, and as a Jew mandated to repair the world during your time on and in it. I am not in the habit of making expressly political sermons and do not intend to begin now.
I do intend to frame for all of us the nature of the decisions that are before us through the frame of our Jewish experience.
As we enter 5769 the stakes could not be higher.
This is a year when the economy matters.
Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by nearly nine percent and the S & P 500 did the same. The Dow dropped 777 points. It was the worst single day drop in the Dow in two decades. This reflects the extreme volatility in what was the greatest economic system in the world. The United States, the lynchpin of the world economy, is hurting, badly. The pain extends throughout all sectors of society. It is hurting the banking and investment system, to be sure. The risks that have been taken on Wall Street for easy money based on sub-prime mortgages have run their course. Like the S & L crisis it is the government that is being called upon to rescue the system.
Yet these grotesque economic risks also hurt the poor, the weak, the vulnerable, those who had the least to begin with and who will have even less now. We must not lose sight of the voiceless, the most vulnerable in our societies, who must be fed, clothed, housed, and cared for in what remains one of the richest countries in the world. To get out of this mess will require pain across the board. We must remain vigilant to ensure that pain is not disproportionate to those who are already hurting.
This is a year when health care matters.
There are millions of uninsured or underinsured Americans who can ill afford the cost of health insurance that would cover them. Nearly 47 million Americans, or 16 percent of the population, were without health insurance in 2005, the latest government data available. Even more scandalous is how this affects our children. Nine million children in this country are uninsured. In a country as wealthy as the United States, with the best medical facilities in the world, there are people who cannot get the treatment they need and must make choices of whether or not to get health care based on financial considerations. It costs much less to be treated by a physician than in an emergency room. Health care should be something that all have, not a privilege. People will still get sick during this economic tumult; we cannot let them down.
This is a year when the environment matters.
The recent spike in oil prices reminds all of us that oil is a finite resource, and that perhaps, just perhaps, we in the United States have been consuming much more than our fair share. In the United States we consume 20,680,000 barrels of oil a day, more than twenty-five percent of the world's consumption. It should alarm, if not frighten you, that a full fifty-eight percent of the oil we use is imported, much of it from countries that fund terrorism.
Investments in the future will mean investing in renewable and sustainable technologies, not only for our energy needs, but to lead the world in creating new technologies. We need to consume less and remember that it is the actions of each one of us that can lead to the incremental change necessary for the sustainability of the environment.
This is a year when the Middle East matters.
Israel had her sixtieth birthday this year while her newest nemesis, Iran, through its bellicose and amoral president, announces that it has missles, perhaps someday with nuclear weapons, that can reach Tel Aviv. Just last week he spoke at the world platform of the United Nation repeating his bellicose lies. In June he was quoted saying "I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene.”
Israel's very survival is no longer just threatened by the radical Palestinians of Hamas in Gaza, or the radical Shia of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israel is in a bad neighborhood with no shortage of enemies who rejoice when innocents are maimed and killed in terrorist attacks. Yet she still wants and seeks peace. A new government is being formed, both in the United States and in Israel.
Israel relies on her friendship with the United States; we, too must do what we can to remain in relationship with our brothers and sisters in Israel.
This is a year when the federal judiciary and especially the Supreme Court matters.
They are appointed for life and their appointments live far beyond the person who appoints them. Our oldest justice will be 88. Social issues are frequently contested in the courts. . .with long lasting impact.
This is a year when federal regulation matters.
The implosion on Wall Street, environmental degradation, weakened consumer protections that have led to injuries--all of these demonstrate that government has a role to play to ensure that fair and competitive markets do not mean free-for-alls or products that can damage or even kill human beings.
This is a year when civil rights matter.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the Executive Branch and the Congress have both taken steps that allow unprecedented domestic wiretapping and spying on Americans in America. Will we, as Americans, allow terrorism and its aftermath to continue to infringe on our civil rights?
This is a year when infrastructure matters.
Our airports are clogged. Our railways dangerously out of date. Many of our highways and bridges suffer from years of deferred maintenance. All of it requires attention. This is the United States: should this be a country where bridges on interstate highways in major cities collapse?
This is a year when YOU matter.
One cannot read the news, day in and day out, and wonder if this world is spiraling so fast that its course cannot be changed.
The answer is: no matter how fast it spirals, you do not have the luxury to sit back on your hands. Our sages teach that it is not your job to finish the task, but neither are you free to desist from it. No matter how daunting these problems are, no matter how small we may see ourselves in the scope of the world, we are given the greatest gift of all, our lives.
We are given time on this planet.
We are given insights and abilities.
We are commanded to act as God's partners in the ongoing work of repairing the world.
To do anything less would be to accept the status quo.
And it is unacceptable.
It is 5769. A new year. A turning point. Time is moving in one direction: forward - with our entire beings.
As we reflect on the gift of time, so, too, may we reflect on how we can use our very beings on behalf of the world that sustains us.
L'shanah tovah tikateivu. May we all be written for good in the new year and may we all use our minds, our hearts, and our agency to do our part in creating a world that matters, l'taken olam l'malchut shaddai, to repair the world to make it worthy of God's creation and our presence on it.
Thinking about God Δ
Where and what is God and is there a place for God in my life?
Not a question that I get too often, nor would I say that it is foremost on most people's minds. This should not surprise any of us--this is a complex question: Where and what is God and is there a place for God in my life?
And yet in its complexity and in the struggle that it entails, there is reward. For how we think about and experience the Divine has the potential to color our whole experience of being. So on this holy Shabbat evening, on the longest day of the year, when we cross the summer solstice, I hope that, just as there is an expansion of light in our lives, I can invite you to open up yourself to the light that is the process of knowing God.
There is no one right answer to doing this Jewishly; in fact, there are many answers. We know God through doing mitzvot, sacred obligations that are incumbent upon us as Jews. We know God through prayer. We know God through study. We know God through how we treat other people. Yet even as I say we "know" God, God is difficult, if not impossible to know. After all, God is, well, God.
Part of what makes God different than concepts that we can grasp with our intellect is that knowing God operates in the world of metaphor---we only have language as humans to describe what we know and experience.
We use words to describe how we feel--I feel close, I feel far, I feel hot, I feel cold. We use metaphors to describe God--God is called many names in our Tradition. We use poetic language, such as what is used in the Kabbalah to describe the inner workings of God. And we use relational language--"Dear God, help me figure out this problem. Be there for me as I try to be there for you." Because we are using language to approximate knowing the unknowable, we live in the land of imprecise. That makes it hard to know God.
So let me offer some guiding questions for you to contemplate as a place to begin or renew your journey to knowing God. There are no right answers, but they are to help all of us move to a place of greater depth in our thinking about God.
When you pray, who or what do you imagine that you are speaking to or with? Do you experience that God listens to you only when your pray in the synagogue--or do you call on God at other places? How do you imagine God's power? As a deity that is involved in people's individuals daily lives, that is immanent, or as a transcendent being that is more abstractly part of the universe, a great other?
Do you think about God as an other that you relate to, as in a covenantal relationship, or do you experience God in more of a unitive manner, that is, as part of you and the world around you. When you are facing a difficult situation, do you imagine God playing a comforting role? Do you experience God as being absent. Or are you angry at God because you believe that God allowed something bad to happen. Have you ever expressed anger at God? Do you think God can handle your anger? How do you grapple with the evil in the world. Should God have prevented it from happening? What if God is behind it? Can you accept that? Can the blame be shared?
How do you experience God making God's presence known in the world today? Do you relate to God's revelation at Mt. Sinai as a one-time affair or something that is renewed daily that you experience?
Now I hope you're thinking: these are not easy questions to contemplate. You are absolutely correct--they are not. But in the struggle to truly know God requires our taken our entire selves--our minds with all of their questions and our mortal bodies. . .as we journey through life. . .to struggle for answers, answers that work for us, or perhaps, never truly finding the answers, the engagement is answer enough.
Happy Birthday Δ
March 21, 2008Once a year we get to celebrate "our special day."
Happy birthday!
It's become quite an industry this birthday business.
Take a look at the amount of space Northshire Bookstore devotes to the birthday card category alone: simple ones, funny ones, ones that make fun of age, ones that give an opportunity to convey a meaningful message: just try to pick the correct one! Well tonight, I think that Sasha and Marlene have found a wonderful way to celebrate the birthday of their husbands, our beloved Arnie and David, by convening community on Shabbat. This is no ordinary birthday party--our entire community is invited, and we begin by bringing in Shabbat together before we gather around the table.
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Birthdays are not celebrated ambivalently--most people either embrace their birthday 110% or wish that it would just come and go with no reminders. I'm of the school that remembering birthdays is a good thing. Not only is it a good thing, it is, to my mind, one of our most important annual reminders that is uniquely personal of the miracle of our being, the miracle of creation, the potential that each of us has and the opportunities we are given to do something with this gift of life.
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From Two Cells to You
In the beginning you were a fertilized egg. Biology ruled who you were. You were a genetic masterpiece, in utero. Your growth was genetically programmed, and your biological mother provided you with the nutrition and blood that you needed to grow for those nine months.
And then in one moment you and your birthday were created simultaneously. What was to that point another day became the day when unique you entered the world.
With one gentle swat on the tush, your lungs are opened and the lifeforce, the air, joins with the circulating blood, flesh and bones, and life begins.
I would suggest that most of us do not remember our births the way our birth mothers do! For even though we are ready to be born, what has developed in the womb begins the journey of reaching potential only once born. That journey includes both our physical growth and our growth in cognition. Babies, as most of you know, when they are pre-verbal communicate with their eyes. When you stare back into a baby's eyes, the baby is making a decision about the level of connection the two of you have established.
Language comes soon thereafter, as the baby develops and begins the transformation into a toddler.
Years of playgroups, school, high school, college--all devoted to that majestic instrument, the human brain.
For as we come into life and consciousness, we lack the immediate cognition that allows us the awareness of those early moments of life. We grow in consciousness and cognition and gradually begin to understand, observe and relate to the world around us.
Yet what is not obvious to us when we are born is easy to forget as we age.
So here's where being Jewish comes in: Our Jewishness catalyzes us to remember to be conscious of the gift of creation, ours, the worlds.
In Judaism we celebrate creation over and over again. We affirm that creation is not a one-time affair, happening only as related in the beginning of Genesis with the two Eden stories--in fact, creation plays a role in most Jewish services.
On Shabbat morning we call the Creator: the "bringer of light, with tender care, upon the earth and its inhabitants, in goodness you renew each day perpetually Creation's wondrous work. Blessed are you Eternal One, the shaper of heavens' lights."
This idea of creation being every present and ever renewing should inspire each and every one of us. The day of our birth is a day of creation. Each day, when we rise to the gift of a new day renewed, we should express gratitude. Our prayers also reflect that: we make the prayer for health followed by the prayer for breath.
We are awake. We are alive.
This reawakening belongs to all of us each and every day. On our birthdays, however, we can and should take time to be reflective on what has come before and what still remains to come.
We should celebrate your creation.
Let us recommit to the idea that birthdays are reflections of the miraculous, the creation of new life and potential.
Let us recommit to age being a signifier of experience, of growth, of wisdom---dare I say it a fine vintage that improves with age?
Let us recommit to birthdays being a chance to remember the value we place on the people we call family and friend and colleague and use that day to tell people how highly we value them.
Let us make this and every birthday a time of truly achieving happiness.
Shabbat Zachor Δ
March 14, 2008We allow ourselves to get easily distracted by salacious stories.
This week is a prime example--and I admit that I was caught up in it, too when I read the news that the soon to be former governor of New York entangled himself with an expensive series of encounters with prostitutes. There are many reasons why this story caught our attention: the perpetrator is larger than life, an activist who went after prostitution rings in his former job as New York's attorney general, and a pol who seemingly did not mind to anger people, including people who would ostensibly be on the same side as he was.
For a moment the story had enough glare to eclipse the ongoing tales about Hillary and Obama and speculation about which one would come out on top.
Fortunately, whatever you think of the governor and what he did, he resigned, allowing it to become a personal and private failure and the business of New York State can now proceed.
Yet the stories about the campaign and the governor disturb me for a different reason. For it was this past week that the United States lost more American soldiers in combat in Iraq, bringing the total to 14 for the month.
In the glare of Spitzer and the campaign, and now the economic problems, these losses barely registered.
I am not here tonight to give a talk about whether we should or should not be in Iraq or what a strategy might be for changing the status quo.
I am here to suggest that we remember that, whatever our personal opinion on the war may be, that three thousand, nine hundred and eighty-seven American soldiers have died in Iraq.
Nearly thirty-thousand Americans have been wounded. Many of them are back in the United States, their lives permanently altered by their injuries.
A war that began in 2003 and continues on in 2008 is not hard breaking news. We have become, many of us, inured to the reality of war. The death and injury, the cost, the extended deployment times that rent asunder families. And not only our countrymen and women: the people of Iraq, too. For while the butcher of Bagdad and many of his minyans are dead, so too, are nearly 90,000 civilians to the war and to internecine Islamic violence.
There is not one of us who does not feel for our dead and injured soldiers and their families.
But what we do need is a memory.
This is the Shabbat before Purim, where we remember the story, as retold in the Book of Esther, of a devastating plot against the Jews. It is one of four special Shabbatot before Pesach. It is known as Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of memory. On this Shabbat, we take out an extra Torah scroll and read the story of Amalek, the sworn enemy of the Jewish people in the Torah. We read:
17 Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt — 18 how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. 19 Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!
We are told to blot out Amalek's memory and yet not forget what he did.
In this recounting of Amalek that we do this Shabbat, there is an analogue for our modern condition where we allow ourselves to forget what is too unbearable to remember. For the Amalek story innocent children and women and stragglers were attacked, the low hanging fruit if you will. It was a humiliating and embarrassing event and it was a defeat at the hands of humans on a journey instigated by God.
We have had many enemies, but one of the main enemies that Shabbat Zachor cautions us against is the enemy of willful forgetting: blotting out information that is too difficult to process.
In our modern times, one of the way we do this is by letting ourselves get diverted to stories like Eliot Spitzer, like who said what about whom in the presidential race.
And we can have a week go by like this one that is elapsing now where we have lost more of our beloved countrymen.
We owe it to them and their families, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our country, and we owe it to our shared humanity to remember the people who are fighting this war: the dead, the living.
We pray that as we remember that those still in Iraq find their way home to their families at the end of their tours as we recommit ourselves to remembering that they are there.
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5768 Δ
The Instrument of Teshuvah- Rabbi David Novak
Of all the instruments in the world, the shofar has to be one of the lowliest.
There's no Steinway and Sons shofar showroom.
There's no brass to polish or reeds to buy.
There are no strings to break, no case to carry it in.
You cannot take a class in shofar sounding at Julliard or the New England Conservatory.
None of us will ever hear a shofar symphony or a pop music song sung to the mellifluous melody of the shofar.
One is hard pressed, really, to even put it in the same genre as instruments.
Yet like the flute and clarinet you have to push air through it.
Like the trombone and trumpet, it sounds.
In short, the shofar is in a class of its own.
And what of its music?
What is it about this instrument that bleats its most primitive, almost primal, sound?
And in the constellation of instruments, what attracts the Jewish soul, year after year, to the sounding of the shofar?
The answer is that the shofar is the instrument of Rosh HaShanah and its music is the music of teshuvah.
Sound the shofar has a singular and umistakable purpose:
To grab our attention.
That's it -- not a fancy theological purpose as is suggested by Jewish thinkers over time.
To grab our attention.
Not to entertain us.
To grab our attention.
And what is the mitzvah of shofar? The religious obligation connected with the shofar?
Is it to see it being played--such as when we go to a concert and watch a symphony and sololist play?
Or is it something else? Something deeper, something more profound, more stirring, more primal, something that goes beyond language's ability to communicate?
The mitzvah of shofar is in its hearing.
And it is a symbiotic mitzvah: the person sounding the shofar makes the blessing and sounds the shofar--yet what that does is allow all of us to fulfill the mitzvah of hearing the shofar.
If I have learned anything about this congregation since June, it is that we are a congregation of thinkers, deep thinkers, who regularly wrestle with important and complex emotions, situations, issues. We use our gifts of intellect and emotion to seek our way through the thicket of conflicting ideas and try to come up with the best possible solution.
The sounding of the shofar, quite literally, pushes all of that aside.
It pierces the mind, breaks through the noise, digs down deep, and sweeps free impediments along the way.
It is a sensory drill.
Each sound echoes to a depth that cannot be measured.
For this is a time of terurah, the Torah tells us, a time for the sounding of the shofar.
In the Torah all that is said about Rosh HaShanah is this: "In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall boserve complete rest, a sacred occasion commemorated with loud blasts. You shall not work at your occupations; and you shall bring an offering by fire to the Eternal.
In Hebrew it is a day of "teruah," a day of making loud blasts.
There must be something to it, this noise that the shofar makes.
It is not pastoral.
It is not comforting.
They are loud blasts.
It is not, truth be told, pleasing to hear for an extended amount of time.
What it is is jarring.
And that's what it SHOULD do.
The shofar is sounded to jar us out of our complacency.
The shofar is sounded to make us examine ourselves, deep within.
It is a jolt of sonic energy, taken in through the ears from where it can spread throughout your entire being.
The piercing cries of the shofar. . .the short sounds...the long sounds...the crying sounds...all in a rhythm that is a call to consciousness.
Each sound a question:
What are you going to do with this one singular life of yours?
What are you doing NOW with this one singular life of yours?
Not easy questions.
Not things we eagerly or readily want to spend thinking about.
Which is why the shofar is, in its simplicity, a radically important instrument.
It is an instrument of awareness.
Arthur Green teaches that the sounds made on the shofar contain symbolic resonance, the dream of restored wholeness, prayer before words, a wordless SHOUT.
The tekiah. A whole note.
The shevarim -- a tripartite broken sound whose very name means "breakings." I started off whole, the shofar says, and I became broken.
Teru'ah, a staccato series of blast fragments, saying, "I was entirely smashed to pieces."
But each series has to end with with a new teki'ah, promising wholeness once more. The shofar cries out a hundred times on Rosh Hashanah: "I was whole, I was broken, even smashed to bits, but I shall be whole again!"
The tekiah!
The sh'varim!
The teru'ah!
It is the shofar. Listen. Hear.
Tekiah g'dolah!!!!
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Rosh Hashanah Morning 5768 Δ
Why It's Good to Make Mistakes
- Rabbi David Novak
There's something about these Days of Awe that point to a measure of human failure.
I am fairly certain in stating that this is not the way that most of us want to spend our time -- not now, not ever.
Who wants to be reminded that it's yet another year and you're once again going through a list of ways we humans go off the rails.
Over and over again, we give voice to a veritable list of ways we hurt ourselves, we hurt each other, and God.
Over and over again, we list our actions, a list of how we humans choose to use our agency in ways that are less than salutary.
It's not bad enough that there is one alphabetical list -- there are two! Both follow a literary style that conveys the comprehensiveness of our human failures. Whether we've done one, two, all or none -- it points to how we human beings function--or should I say disfunction.
What becomes apparent is that we use our human freedom to veer off course.
It's not good for us. It's not good for other human beings.
Yet. . . we do it.
Because it would be impossible to perform teshuvah, to repair relationships with ourselves and with others if we were perfect.
Perfection itself is an imperfect aspiration.
Perfect people don't grow.
Pefect people don't exist.
People who make mistakes, do.
So here is my radical idea at this time of focusing on where we miss the mark:
It is good to make mistakes.
You heard me: it is good to make mistakes.
Now don't get me wrong.
I'm not talking about mistakes made by professional malpractice,
mistakes that cause physical injury,
or mistakes done with the intention of destroying another person.
I'm also not talking about maliciousness done with intent.
These are not mistakes -- they are much worse.
What I am speaking of are those mistakes that we can learn from,
those mistakes that are made honestly, accidentally, without intention.
Mistakes happen for good reason and no reason at all. Usually they happen -- well -- by mistake.
Under the good reason category, there are mistakes that happen because you are stretching yourself. You are trying something new, like speaking a new language, a new sport, or anything else that puts you squarely outside of your comfort zone.
Let me give you a personal example.
In my rabbinical school training, not much emphasis is put on chanting from the Torah.
Many of my colleagues would rather have a teeth pulled than attempt to make sense of the Hebrew letters on the Torah scroll, written, as they are, without punctuation, vowels, or cantillation marks.
In other words, if you are up on the bimah reading from the Torah you need to know where to start, where to end, how to pronounce the words, and what notes to chant. Foreign language? Check. Fumbling around looking for the starting and ending points? Check. Complicated pronunciation? Check. Remembering the notes? Check.
Or at least that's what you hope. What happens, though, is sometimes you get up there and one part of it flies out of your mind--a section that was chanted beautifully not five minutes before for the one hundredth time escapes your head completely.
And then it happens: you are up there and you make a mistake. And if you're in my position, you're making a public mistake.
So what do you do?
You have several choices.
You can be embarrassed.
You can apologize.
You can try not to react when you hear about your mistake being retold to others later.
Or:
You can keep doing it.
You can keep learning several verses in the Torah and try to chant them week after week.
Sometimes making similar mistakes.
But over time what happens is that the mistakes are themselves growth marks, like rings in a tree, marking the growth of a person.
That's another reason why making mistakes are essential for being human.
Living life is a process of living and learning, making mistakes and growing from them. Without the opportunity for growth, our lives would become static, stuck in a place where being called-out for mistakes paralyzes ever being willing to grow outside of your safety zone.
So if mistakes are so important for our development as humans, why then, do we spend so much time at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur year regretting them?
And is it an all or nothing proposition? Is perfection the religious value being fostered? Or is it something more subtle?
Let's go back to idea of growth. Knowledge, properly assimilated into one's being, has the potential to lead to growth.
In the Torah, we see that God is not portrayed as a Being that is perfect. God destroyed the created world in the Noah epic. In one fit of rage after another, God's anger leads to the destruction of the people He has brought out of slavery.
This behavior often leaves us bewildered or even turned off. Some have suggested that God was learning about His creation as His creation was learning about God.
Our holy texts also portray the Biblical human as far from perfect. In fact, they were pretty good at making mistakes.
They created and danced around a golden calf.
They complained incessantly.
They failed to have faith in God.
They wanted to turn around and go back to Egypt.
They gave false reports of the Promised Land.
In piques of anger at a nation of former slaves, anxious and scared in the desert, God is described, with nostrils flaring in anger, as mowing down those involved, over and over, for the people being, well, human. They made mistakes. They paid with their lives.
Yet the knowledge of these stories, what we have inherited, give us the opportunity to compare ourselves to our Biblical ancestors, lo these many years into the future, and we see that yes, human beings in the Bible were fallible.
This is a time of the year for all of us to acknowledge our mistakes, myself included, to take stock of them, to learn what is learn able, and to try to keep from repeating the same mistakes.
Each mistake is a chance to grow.
Each mistake is a chance to learn.
One mistake should not, cannot be made: to replace our human nature that learns from its mistakes with a definition of perfection that seals us off from life. Mistakes do not exist to cause embarrassment or to hold over another person's head.
Let our mistakes be what they are -- painful, maybe personally embarrassing, clumsy, sometimes even stupid.
But let us strive not for perfection, but for growth that comes from our human nature, our human nature of making mistakes.
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Kol Nidre Sermon 5768 Δ
Talk
- Rabbi David Novak
This is a talk about---Talk.
More specifically, it's about talking.
Something we Jews are quite good at.
Some of you may remember a time in early June when I last spoke about talking&emdash;it was my first time in this privileged position that you have given to me, this place on the pulpit to speak publicly.
If you will recall, the Torah portion that week was about the scouts who Moses sent into the Promised Land to assess what challenges may lie before them.
Moses was politically smart&emdash;all of the people would be coming to this new place, so the report would have to come from representatives from all of the tribes.
Twelve chieftans were appointed to go, a leader from each tribe. Twelve is a number that means that in all likelihood you will get different opinions, but there would be probably enough of a consensus to get a fair report.
When the scouts returned to the wandering Israelites in the desert, to the generation who had seen God redeem them from slavery, to the people who had stood at Sinai at the time of the revelation of Torah, they gave their report of what lay in front of them in the Promised Land, the land that God said they will take with God's help.
The people? Powerful--giants.
The fruit of the vine? Immense.
Friend or foe? The enemies of the Israelites, everywhere.
The chance that we could ever accomplish conquering the land? Little to none.
"We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we," they told all the people. "The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are men of great size; we saw the Nephilim there---and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them." (Num: 13:31-33)
Joshua and Caleb, two of the twelve, strenuously protested this erroneous report.
They said: "The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land. If YHVH is pleased with us, He will bring us into that land, a land that flows with milk and honey, and give it to us. Only you must not rebel against YHVH. Have no fear then of the people of the country, for they are our prey. Their protection has departed from them, but YHVH is with us. Have no fear of them!" (Num:14: 6-10)
The people's response?
They threatened to pelt Joshua and Calev with stones!
It was ten-to-two and the people would have none of what Joshua and Calev were saying.
The people formed their opinions after the majority.
They did not want to hear the truth.
And with the erroneous information, the people were off and running. Repeating what they heard---one to another to another to another.
Their focus was on the impending disaster they perceived, a disaster only because people believed the scouts' erroneous report and fostered anxiety among themselves.
The two who were telling the truth&emdash;that the land is beautiful and manageable, well, they are in fear of their lives.
And God? God runs out of patience, saying to Moses, "How lon will this people spurn Me, and how long will they have no faith in Me despite all the signs that I have performed in their midst? I will strike them with a pestilence and disown them, and I will make of you a nation far more numerous than they!" But Moses persuades God to temper the anger, using YHVH's own words: "The lord&emdash;slow to anger and abounding in kindness, forgiving iniquity and transgressions. . .Pardon, I pray, the inquity of this people according to your great kindness. . ." And YHVH said, "I pardon as you ask…"
This is the same language we use in our Yom Kippur services.
But herein lies the punishment for this generation:
They will die out in the desert, not seeing fulfilled, with their own eyes, God's promise to bring them to a land of milk and honey.
It was a case of false information that was repeated that led to the disintegration of an entire community. It was, by any measure, a tragedy of epic proportions.
False information, based in anxiety and designed to frighten, took hold.
The truth no longer mattered.
In fact, it was next to impossible for the people to realize what the truth was.
And it destroyed their future as they wandered for another 38 years, waiting, literally, for the generation to die out.
It is a story that resonates to this day, for we human beings are still speaking.
Tonight we turn our attention to speaking.
We will, over the next 24 hours, make confession and ask for forgiveness for a range of ways in which we live our lives where we use our human powers, the agency that we have been given to make choices, and we choose wrong.
In the viddui, the confessional, and in the Al Het, for the list of sins, each is an acrostic, running the gamut of the Hebrew alphabet.
The idea is that the complete range of human behavior for which we are repenting and seeking forgiveness is covered.
If a human can do it, it's covered.
Yet there is one way that we humans err that is more pervasive than others.
It is how we use our power of communication, the combination of brain, senses, voice-box, tongue and air that becomes the language we speak.
It takes all of that to create speech. It all happens so quickly--thought to tongue to words. We humans are remarkable creations.
Yet given this great gift of speaking and understanding, we easily misuse it.
But don't think for a second that I am speaking of only one kind of speaking.
Our tradition in its wisdom acknowledges that using our gift of speech poorly has many manifestations in which it can go bad.
One has to look no farther than the liturgy that we are doing tonight and tomorrow, our sacred ritual for Yom Kippur.
First we have the viddui. The ay-ya-ya-ya and the breast beating as we go through the 22-item list. And out of the 22 on the list? How many would you guess have to do with speech?
D'barnoo doofi. Spoken slander. In other words, we use speech to tear down others by saying things that degrade another human's reputation.
Taphalnew sheker: Added falsehood on falsehood. Meaning that one lie can easily beget another.
Yaatzno rah. Given evil advice. Knowlingly giving counsel that another person may take, leading to an untoward outcome.
Latzno. We have mocked.
But that's not all. Oh no.
Then there is the Al Heyt, the acrostic list, sometimes a single acrostic, sometimes a double acrostic that beings "Al heyt sh-hatanew l'phanecha: For the sin we have committed before you.
Bveetooi spatayim. For the utterance of the lips.
Debor peh: Misusing speech.
Vidoi Peh: Insincere confession.
Tepshoot peh. Foolish talk (idle talk and gossip)
Toomat siphatayiim: with impurity of the lips -- profanity and unclean language
Leshon hara. STUPID TALK., literally evil talk (slander)
Latzone: scoffing-ridiculing a person
RCHELOOT. GOSSIPING. Talebearing.
Shvoat Shav: Swearing in vain.
Look how many ways we can use speech to go off the rails. All of these fall into these broad categories:
(a) speaking without thinking
(b) speaking to shared information that has no business being shared or repeated
(c) speaking to insult another person, to the face, or behind the back
(d) profane, garbage talk
and finally---in a category of its own, insincere confession, Viddui Peh.
Speaking without thinking, gossiping, insulting, and garbage talk: it is obvious as to the why one should not do that. It's hurtful. It's disrespectful. It reflects poorly on you. It can take-on a life of its own. It can leave a person reeling. It can destroy relationships. It can cause the break down of community.
You know all of this. You don't need me up here reminding you of this. Because the liturgy will do that for you over the next day.
Yet that, too, requires focus. For most of us, our time of confession is but this time of year, this day of Yom Kippur. Our viduii peh, the confession of the lips, is what we do to reconcile our relationships with God. If these words have any familiarity, it is from this liturgy.
If you're like me, you often wonder: why oh why does the liturgy repeat itself? Why is what we do tonight done again tomorrow morning, early afternoon, late afternoon, and in the case of Yom Kippur, that one-time-a-year extra Neilah service?
Isn't one time enough? Doesn't my intellect warrant a more interesting liturgy?
I have one answer: viduii peh. What is the nature of the words that you and I are using, tonight and tomorrow, to reflect our true sincerity in our confessing?
This repetition offers us the opportunity to penetrate our defenses that are part of who we are the rest of the year, to look at the parts of ourself that are not so easy to confront, and to get to a level of personal honesty.
Which is why throughout the hours of Yom Kippur, we repeat these same words because we, ourselves, have the potential to come to these words differently each time.
Here is another suggestion, powerful in its subtlety:
Given all of the ways we abuse speech, we use this one day to direct all of those elements that we can so readily abuse---the tongue, the brain, the voice box, the air, the language to a different kind of language.
For one day our speech is directed away from how we abuse it and taken to a higher place, demonstrating a way of being in the world where speech, properly channeled, is a powerful instrument of interaction.
Hopefully, like hearing a song that you can't get out of your head, they will continue to rumble around inside of you long after the gates of Yom Kippur close tomorrow night.
Take note your recitation of them tonight&emdash;and again tomorrow morning and afternoon. Then---during the Neilah service, the final, fifth service, where we stand before the open Ark, take note of what the experience is like then, when you know you have this one last time to utter them.
And then there is this:
All we humans have to communicate are words. And we are communicating to the One who needs no language. Which is why in directing our speech this one day our language finds its power in conveying the deepest recesses of the human to an Infinite Other.
Yet we need reminders not just on Yom Kippur of the power of our speaking.
We need reminders every day to make us conscious of the incredible power of talk. Which is why we can look to our liturgical inheritance and find this positive statement in Psalm 34, affirming the power of speech when it is used for good and the power of humans to seek and do good and build harmony in the world:
Mi ha-ish hehchaphatz chaiim
Who is the person that desires life
Ohav yamim lirote tov.
Who loves days of seeing good?
Nitzor lshoncha marah
Guard your tongue from evil
Ospatecha midarbare mirma
And guard your tongue from speaking deceit
Soor mayrah vasay tov
Turn from evil and do good,
bkaysh shalom v'radphayhoo
Seek peace and pursue it.
As we recite the words, as we hear our words, as we think about our words, as we remember the power of speech and the choices we have, let us pray:
May the words of my mouth and the thoughts of my heart find favor before You, God, my rock and my redeemer.
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