Rabbi's Sermons

YOM KIPPUR

5770

In Jerusalem, on the eve of the last day of Pesach, when Shirat Hayam, the Song of the Sea is sung in the synagogue, a group of Satmar Chasidim gathers for a special ritual. They stream into their synagogue, which has been emptied of all seats. The ceremony begins with a soft singing of Shirat Hayam. And then a space parts open in this packed hall, and the rebbe starts dancing through the crowd. As the rebbe dances, and the path continues to open through the undulating crowd, the singing gets louder and louder. This singing and dancing goes on for hours as they re-enact the splitting of the sea:  the dancing Chasidim are the waters making way for the rebbe who is the Jewish people.

But “re-enactment” is not the right word. The ceremony is really a re-living, a re-experiencing in the here-and-now, of the Exodus. For all intents and purposes, these Chasidim are leaving Egypt!  They are experiencing in the present what happened thousands of years ago…and they do that every year!   

While we might not do it as passionately, we also re-experience the great events of our history.

• At our s’darim, we eat the foods of Egypt, recline on our chairs and celebrate that we too have just been liberated from Egypt.


• On Sukkoth, we live in make-shift huts as we make our trek through the desert.

This is what our holiday ritual does for us:  it brings us to re-live the great events of our people so that there is no past-and-present, and there is no “us-and-them” – as if to say this happened to them but not to us – it is all us, and it is all now!  We left Egypt; We received Torah at Sinai; We wandered through the desert.

Nor is all this re-living happy. We have Tisha B’Av, the 9^th day of Av, when we sit on the floor, wear the clothing of mourning, fast, don’t shave, and chant the book of Lamentations in a wailing sound - to re-experience the destruction of the temple.

But this is not the only Jewish model of memory and commemoration. There are more ways to commemorate than by re-experiencing of the original event.

• The Torah reading for Yom Kippur says three times that the practices of the day shall be “a law for us for all time,” “chuqat olam” in Hebrew. But that is not what we do.  We no longer sacrifice animals, nor do we want to. We no longer believe in pronouncing our sins over the head of a goat; nor do we want to. And, with all due deference to the kohanim in the congregation, we no longer believe that anyone can take away our sins for us – nor do we want to.

Another model of Jewish memory is a process where the essence of the idea is preserved and all the external forms change.

• I was sitting with Moshe at the AIPAC conference last spring getting ready to hear Shimon Peres speak. On the screens all across the front of the room flashed pictures of past leaders of Israel:  there was Chaim Weitzman and President Truman; David Ben Gurion with Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy; Golda Meir with President Nixon; Yitzchak Rabin with President Clinton and Binyamin Netanyahu with President Obama.

Looking at this impressive array, Moshe leaned over to me and, speaking about President Peres, said, “He’s the last of that great generation.” 

Moshe was right:  Shimon Peres is the last of the generation of chalutzim, the pioneers who built the state. As I listened to Peres speak, I sat there wondering, “What do we owe this generation of giants?”  How do we keep their work alive?

• Must we do things exactly as they did? 


• Should Israelis go to Independence Hall in Tel Aviv every year and declare the State, broadcasting that declaration over the radio?

Israel does none of those things. Nor do Israelis dance in the streets of Kikar Tziyon in Jerusalem.

• We have our handful of sacred moments:  redemption, revelation, wandering and destruction – these we re-create; all the rest we adapt in order to keep them alive.

Rabbi Art Green, one of the leading American Jewish thinkers, said this:

• “If I were to give my kid exactly the same Yiddishkeit that my grandfather had in his shtetl in Lithuania, I’d be doing completely the wrong thing. Some people think what you have to do is just keep it exactly as it was, without changing it, and pass it down. I call it Judaism in formaldehyde. There won’t be anything alive in there.” 

I was raised with a healthy dose of Jewish guilt. In deference to my mother, that guilt did not come from her. It came from my grandfather who regularly told us what it was like coming to this country and getting established here. And he always ended his lectures with the words, “You kids don’t know how lucky you have it.” 

I struggle with the issue of what we owe to those who came before us:  what do we owe to the chalutzim who built the State of Israel; what do we owe those who died, and those who survived, the Shoah; what do we owe our personal ancestors whose lives were much more difficult than ours, and on whose shoulders all of us stand?  How do we keep their struggling, their sacrifice, their legacy alive? 

There is a well-known Midrash on the opening words of the Amidah – Eloheinu veilohei avoteinu – Our God and God of our ancestors. The Midrash says that each of us must have two foundations to our faith:  one that we inherit and one that we create on our own.

• We must preserve some things from the past and we must re-create them and make them our own. If we don’t do that, then our faith will be, as Art Green says, formaldehyde – a dry relic of the past.

What do we owe to those who came before us?  We owe them a commitment at least as passionate as theirs.

We do not owe them replication. We do owe them determination.

I believe we are living in an unprecedented time for the Jewish people.

• The Jewish people are not completely loved and secure throughout the world;


• Judaism is not understood or practiced as widely as it should be.


• Iran is a very serious threat to Israel and to all the rest of us.  

But we have never been as free, as prosperous, and as influential as we are right now – here in the United States, in Israel, and throughout the world.

• What do owe to those who built this Jewish world for us?  We do not owe them a replication of their world. We owe them hard work to make it more vibrant than it is today.


• What do we owe those who died and those who survived the Shoah?  We owe them that we will never be that defenseless again, politically or militarily.

To those who came before us, we owe them passionate life. We owe them that their work will be carried on; that we will pick up where they left off.

We can do both:  we can hang on to and relive the sacred moments of the past. And then we can move forward into life.

• This is what we owe to our parents and our heroes.


• It is what we owe to children and the future as well.

ROSH HASHANAH I

5770

You know the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip sliding away. 

Slip sliding away; slip sliding away;

 

God only knows; God makes his plan;

The information’s unavailable to the mortal man.

We’re working our jobs; collect our pay.

Believe we’re gliding down the highway when in fact we’re slip sliding away.

Which one of us has not felt that way this past year?  Which one of us has not been touched by loss or insecurity, by sudden illness or other pain, that’s challenged us and shaken our moorings?

That same song writer wrote these lyrics some years later:

Well, I’m accustomed to a smooth ride

How many of us thought we were settled and secure only to find that the road was going to be a lot bumpier than we planned for.

We believed we were in control. We believed that if we did our homework and invested well; if we were diligent in our work and produced good results; if we were careful with our diet and took care of our health, that life would be good; that we could plan for a future that would go our way.

And then last year happened – and we found that all of our hard work and planning, our living prudently, could not always protect us.

On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed…

The fragility of our lives and our work was made clear to all of us this past year.

This is not the first time I’ve seen painful economic and personal struggle.

• I was a rabbi in Texas when the bottom fell out of the real estate market there in the mid-1980s. I’ll never forget the time a woman came to shul on Saturday morning – she was not a member of the congregation; I had never met her before – and she asked to see me after services. She told me that her husband was a commercial real estate developer and had lost everything. They were living on money from her parents. The couple had three children and the husband was thinking of leaving. He was ashamed that he could not provide for his family.


• I offered to see the two of them together. Struggling for words, I told her that all marriages went through dark times; that it was important to let her husband know that she loved him no matter what. I told her that I believed that, if at all possible, remaining in her marriage was most important for the well-being of their children and, hopefully, for them.


• I tried to get in touch with the woman after our meeting to see what happened, but she never called me back.

I have seen before these difficult times, and the desperation that can come with them. I remember the pain of the personal struggles and choices that must be made.

The climax of Un’taneh Toqef, the prayer I quoted before, is these words: 

But repentance, prayer and acts of tzedaqah

Annul the severity of the decree.

I’ve always wondered:  how do repentance, prayer, and acts of tzedaqah make the decree – the decree that life will be a roller coaster, the kind of roller coaster where we won’t be able to see what’s coming around the bend – how do they make the fragility of life any easier?

I understand these words as a contrast with the words that come right before them. The previous paragraph ends with the words “who shall be made poor and who made rich; who brought low and who elevated.”  And then we have the words, “But repentance, prayer and acts of tzedaqah annul the severity of the decree.”  What’s the connection between these ideas?   I think it is this:

As long as we measure the worth of our lives by who is rich and who is poor, who is elevated and who is low, then we leave ourselves open to being devastated by the bad times. If we measure the success of our lives by how much we have; how much of the world we’ve seen; we will be badly shaken by these times. We leave ourselves open to questioning ourselves and our worth as people. 

But if we use other standards for evaluating our lives – if we measure our lives by the amount of good we have done in the world, by how much we have made the world better because of our presence – through acts of personal change and prayer and tzedaqah – then the bottom lines of our portfolios and the personal sorrows of our lives become just a little bit easier to deal with. We can still say, “I have, and I am, doing good. I make a difference.” 

At the end of our Torah reading for this morning, after Abraham made a treaty with Avimelekh, the Torah tells us that Abraham planted a tree – the Hebrew word is “eshel”. As I’ve taught before, the rabbis say that this is a metaphor for the fact that Abraham opened an inn; that “eshel” is an acronym for “achilah,” “sh’tiyah,” and “linah.”  The rabbis teach that through his “chesed,” his generosity and his hospitality, Abraham brought others to the awareness and acceptance of God.

MIDRASHIC TEXT

Our worth as people is not measured by how much we have. Our worth is measured by the spirit we bring to the world.

My friend in Texas, Tank Rubinett, always said to me, “Marc:  it’s not how much you have, but how much you give that makes a difference.”

And we all have something to give. Whatever the condition of our spirits and our pocketbooks, we still have time and generosity and love to give.

Monsignor Higgins once said that if you want to take care of your own troubles, go take care of someone else’s, and somehow your own will not be so bad. (SEE RABBI NACHMAN). 

Our worth is much bigger than we’ve given ourselves credit for.

In Hebrew we say, “Gam zu ya-avor:” “This too shall pass.”  What will we do when this is all over?  How will we live when the Dow is back over 12,000?  Will we think that the smooth ride is back, that we can glide down the highway once again? 

There is a Chasidic tale about a rabbi who asks his master to tell him the one true way to serve God. The master answers that there is no one way to serve God. For one person serves God through fasting and another through eating; one through study and another through action. Each person must search for and discover his or her particular way and then follow that with all one’s heart.

In so many ways, Judaism teaches that each of us has a unique, individual spirit. We each have something that only we and only we can give to the world. If we’re going to measure our worth in any way, it must be whether we are making our contribution; whether we are expressing the unique gift that each of us has within us.    

To those of us who are hurting, the Torah reading for today teaches that God heard the cry of Ishmael “where he was,”  “b-asher hu sham.”  The Midrash says that God hears the cries of everyone wherever they are:  whatever place in life they are at. No matter how many or few mitzvoth you’ve done this year; no matter how many or few times you’ve been in shul this year, God hears the cries of people wherever they are.

This time of uncertainty will pass. But when that happens, the measure of our lives will be much more than how much we have. It will be the extent to which we express the unique gifts that all of bring to the world. It will be the extent to which all of us bring goodness and God’s name to the world.

No matter how bumpy the road, we all have something special to give. I pray that in bringing that gift to the world, we can bring some joy back to the world as well.