Sermon for Yom Kippur Morning, Beth Israel Synagogue, 10 Tishrei, 5775

Long before I came to this shul – before even I thought about becoming a rabbi – I decided that if I were ever given the opportunity to give a High Holiday sermon, I would talk about the importance of building a sukkah. Some time thereafter, my friend and mentor, Rabbi Hesch Sommer, did in fact give me a chance to deliver a sermonette on Yom Kippur. I did not talk about the sukkah. In the eight years I have been here, I have delivered perhaps 35 High Holidays sermons. None of them has been about the importance of the sukkah. Indeed, as of last week, I had no intention of talking about the sukkah this year. But then came the first day Rosh Hashanah discussion group and what turned out to be a very animated conversation about Celebrate Wallingford. Shortly thereafter, I decided that the time for the sukkah sermon had finally arrived. So today's planned sermon was retooled for last night, last night's sermon was placed in my “sermons I never gave” file, and the one sermon topic I have been harboring for a dozen years or more is finally getting a hearing.

I built my first sukkah maybe 15 or 16 years ago. Sarah would have been 5 or 6, Rachel 1 or 2. It was built out of 4-inch PVC pipe, held together with duct tape. I set out our festival dinner inside it and the thing promptly collapsed in the breeze.

The next year I got serious. The sukkah I built was of 2 by 3 furring strips, fashioned into four foot by eight foot frames with cross bars for added strength. I drilled holes equidistant from the top and bottom of each frame, through which I bolted the frames together. The roof was supported by 2 by 3 beams resting in aluminum stud hangers. The finished sukkah was 16 feet long by eight feet wide. The next year I doubled its size. At 16 feet square, I have one very large sukkah. I also have lights for the sukkah and propane and kerosene space heaters. Since the sukkah leans against the exterior wall of our family room – where our modem is located – the sukkah has a very strong Wi-Fi signal. All-in-all, it is quite far from a hardship to dwell in my sukkah, except on the coldest or rainiest of nights. And we don't actually sleep out there, but we do pretty much everything else.

Sometimes, on a sunny afternoon during Sukkoth, I will sit in my sukkah and look up at the blue sky and the changing leaves through the bamboo mats that are its ceiling. I will look at the tarp covered walls of this structure that sits, for 51 weeks every year, stacked up in the back of my shed. And I will know in those moments what it means to dwell in a makom kodesh – a holy space. My extended family gathers and we laugh and talk and eat together, tenuously but lovingly sheltered in this sukkat shalom - this peaceful refuge.

But the real magic of building a sukkah is what it has done for my kids. When they were younger, they would spend their free time in the days after Yom Kippur cutting up strips of construction paper and stapling them together into what we would call “the paper chain that ate Connecticut.” It would be probably 50 feet long by the time they were done and we would thumb-tack it to the ceiling and the center posts to give the place a more festive air. My kids would come home from school and do their homework in the sukkah. We would have dinner there – often with friends joining us. After which we would sit outside and read or talk or play computer games until the cold started to creep into our bones. Then we would turn off the lights and go back inside, happy, but also a bit saddened, knowing that another day in that sacred space had come to an end.

The week of Sukkoth is magical around my house. It is like a week out of time. Everything is centered around that sacred space and the joy of sharing it with our loved ones. Its always a sad day when the sukkah comes down and gets stored away for another year. The air is invariably cold – a reminder that fall is about to set in for real. And this fragile structure whose walls are sheets of plastic and whose roof lets in the starlight reminds us of how tenuous is our own hold on this world. I always say a prayer when the last pieces of the sukkah get stored away. “Please, God, let me merit the chance to dwell in this holy place again next year.”

Sukkoth is, in our tradition, HaHag – the festival. It is the perfect holiday. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are centered around the synagogue and not readily accessible to young children. Hanukah and Purim are minor holidays whose very adult themes have been glossed over with child-centered activities. Pesach is perhaps the most powerful of our holidays, but it is also burdensome. But Sukkoth is z'man simkhateinu – the time of our rejoicing. Building a sukkah and celebrating this week-long festival combines serious and distinctive religious practice in the most conducive atmosphere possible – concentrated time with one's family. Build a sukkah and celebrate these days and you will stamp your children's lives with a strong and affirming Jewish identity. They will love being Jewish. They will never ask for a Christmas tree because they will never envy anyone else's practices when there's are so beautiful.

To build a sukkah is to build a Jewish soul. That is what we as individuals, and we as a community need to be – builders. In a passage from Isaiah it says “And all your children will be students of the Lord, וְרַב שְׁלוֹם בָּנָיִךְ - and great will be the shalom of your בָּנָיִךְ - your children. But the Talmud teaches us - אל תקרי בניך אלא בוניך – Don't read the passage to say בניך – your children. Change the vowels around so that it reads instead בוניך – your builders. Because those of us who are builders can overcome any stumbling block.

Which brings me back to Rosh Hashanah and our impromptu catharsis over Celebrate Wallingford. I knew before that day that members of this shul were outraged that this “feel good about the place you live” festival was scheduled for our holiest day. I share that outrage. I share that outrage because I know it is part of a larger pattern of disrespect that this town has shown for its Jewish residents. When the date of Yom Kippur is printed on practically every civil calendar, it is outrageous that a town like Wallingford, a town that has had a visible Jewish community within it for more than 100 years, should schedule such a celebration at such a time. I cannot think of how this can occur except through willful antipathy or unacceptable ignorance. I expressed the source and the depths of my outrage in a letter to Mayor Dickinson. At the time that I sent it, I believed much of the outrage we all felt could be soothed by an empathetic word from him. But while Mayor Dickinson's response to me was thoughtful, there was something that I heard in our Rosh Hashanah discussion that told me that the people of this congregation don't need to hear from their mayor. They need to hear from their rabbi.

What I heard that day – expressed repeatedly and by a number of you – was your belief in the importance of having a Jewish community in Wallingford. That belief was never expressed in response to a particular point. No one was standing up there saying there should not be a Jewish community in Wallingford. Rather, I think the comment reflected a deep seated anxiety that that Jewish community is under threat. The callousness with which this town scheduled Celebrate Wallingford triggered in each of us the profound sense that we are – at best – on the town's margins. And maybe not even there.

Well, the truth is, we are marginalized in this town, and that is the town's loss. And we are indeed a community under threat. But the threat isn't out there. Its in here. Because if there is a reason why it is important that Wallingford have a Jewish community, it has to be for something other than expressing our outrage and victimization. No one will sign on to join a community whose sole purpose is to cry foul at the rest of the world. Doing so is neither fun nor particularly enlightening. More than that, its a waste. Its a waste of Judaism which I am telling you is the most intellectually diverse and spiritually enriching religion in the world. Indeed, as someone who very slowly and carefully and thoughtfully made the journey from atheism to the rabbinate, I believe that Judaism is the world's greatest achievement because it places humanity on the plain of holiness.

Just think about this day: this day of atonement. Think about it in the context of the days that came before it; the preceding month where we were called upon to take an accounting of our soul, and Rosh Hashanah where we were asked to see ourselves as standing before the Judge of all the world. It doesn't matter whether you buy into the imagery. It doesn't matter if you believe in God. Because what Judaism demands of us is that we judge ourselves and make amends for our failings before we stand before God. What it demands, very simply, is that we see our lives as sacred trusts and take them seriously. The purpose of this day is to solemnize – through serious reflection and symbolic affliction – the work we have done to make ourselves better. There is nothing that is going on outside that can compare in importance with what is going on in here. Let that thought temper your outrage.

But there is more.

When we began our prayers here last night, we responded as a congregation to the cantor's entreaty for forgiveness with the words וַיֹּאמֶר יְיְ סָלַחְתִּי כִּדְבָרֶךָ - And God said, I have forgiven according to your word. The line is actually a verse from Torah. God had commanded the Israelites to cross the Jordan and take possession of their promised land. But the Israelites refused. They thought themselves too weak compared to those who inhabited the land already. They saw themselves as victims and preferred to complain over how they had been abused rather than build their homes and their lives. God was incensed and wanted to wipe them out. But Moses entreated on their behalf: סְלַח־נָא לַעֲוֹן הָעָם הַזֶּה כְּגֹדֶל חַסְדֶּךָ - Please forgive this people according to the greatness of Your kindness. And God responds סָלַחְתִּי כִּדְבָרֶךָ - I have forgiven according to your word. Think about that for a moment. Moses did not sin, but he is the one who asked for forgiveness. It was the Israelites who sinned, but they made no such entreaty. God forgave them anyway.

Take a lesson from this. The town of Wallingford is not going to apologize for what happened, and even if it does, it will not do so adequately. Forgive them anyway. Forgive them for your own sake because we as a community have better and more important things to do than be angry and count ourselves victims. We cannot be victims because we have to be builders. We have sukkahs to build and souls to nourish. We have identities to be formed and ideas to be spread. We have as our inheritence the most beautiful and precious possession: the Torah, an עץ חיים – a tree of life from which has been built the most life affirming tradition the world has ever known. What are we going to build to affirm that tradition? Look around us. This shul is the makom, the sukkah that our parents built for us. What are we going to do that turns us from banim, children, into bonim, builders? Look around again. Everything we need to build a vibrant, modern Jewish community is here in this room, right now. All we need is the will to be builders. Who among you is willing to swing a hammer and build the Jewish community we so desperately need?