Sermon for Second Day Rosh Hashanah, Beth Israel Synagogue, 2 Tishrei, 5775

A couple of years ago, I came to a startling revelation. I had never, to my knowledge, had a Budweiser. I was not much of a beer drinker when I was young, and by the time I did start drinking it, I could afford Sam Adams. What was I to do about this situation? After very little thought, I concluded that I would be in more exclusive company by staying away from the stuff. And the assurance by any number of friends that I wasn't missing anything confirmed me on my course. For all I do, this Bud's for . . . well. . .

I share with you this barely interesting piece of personal trivia because up until today, I have never given a sermon on the Akeidat Yitzhak – the binding of Isaac. I say this knowing full well that, unlike the Bud, most of you have not given a sermon on this topic either. But the binding of Isaac is no doubt the perennial most popular second day Rosh Hashanah sermon topic, so for me, not having given such a sermon is a bit more unusual. Part of the reason is that, for the past four years, my mentor, Rabbi Hesch Sommer has given the second day sermon. Rabbi Sommer himself is the author of a wonderful sermon on the Akeidah which was published in a journal whose editor swore he would never publish another such sermon. But a bigger part of the reason is that I have doubted I could have anything original or insightful to say. Those doubts continue with me. But they have been crowded out by the sense that any rabbi worth his tzit-tzit should venture to say something about this subject. So with no small measure of trepidation, here goes.

I want to open this discussion by examining one of the more perplexing questions raised by this story: why doesn't Abraham – who argues with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah – not offer a single word in defense of his son? These two events set up a devastating contrast. In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham is at his most loquacious and argumentative as he tries to talk God out of destroying these two cities: “Will You sweep away righteous with evil? Perhaps there are fifty righteous ones in the midst of the city. Will You sweep away the place rather than forgive it for the sake of fifty righteous ones in its midst? It would be a sacrilege for You to do this thing – to cause the death of the righteous along with the wicked – as though the righteous were like the wicked. It is a sacrilege to You. Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” Having established his point through God's consent, Abraham continues to argue – reducing the number of righteous on account of whom the cities will be spared all the way down to ten.

And yet, when God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham says nothing. Not a word. In fact, he rises up early the next morning to get started on his journey – the split wood and his ignorant son in tow. And yet where is the justice in this command? Why will not Abraham place the mirror before the Judge of all the earth on behalf of his son as he did for the strangers in Sodom and Gomorrah?

Indeed Sodom and Gomorrah is not the only time Abraham argues with God. And while this argument is less dramatic – really just a single sentence of parental longing – it is perhaps more relevant to our understanding of the Akeidah. When God tells Abraham that his 90-year-old wife Sarah will bear him a son who will inherit his covenant and his blessing, Abraham appears dismayed. He already has a son – Ishmael – by Sarah's handmaid, Hagar. לוּ יִשְׁמָעֵאל יִחְיֶה לְפָנֶיךָ - Oh that Ishmael might live before You! pleads Abraham on behalf of the son he so dearly loves. אֲבָל

replies God. "Nevertheless . . ."

But if there are other instances besides Sodom and Gomorrah where Abraham argues with God, there are also many instances when he does not. For those of us who have reflexively covered our groins with our hands when attending a bris, we should note that the 99-year-old Abraham offers no objection when ordered to perform that operation on himself. Most powerfully, though, at the very beginning of his story, God commands Abraham – then known as Abram – to leave his land, his birthplace, his family and set out for some unspecified place that will be shown to him. Abram, 75 years old at the time, who as far as we know has had no previous communication from God, leaves behind everything he knows without saying a word. Interestingly, the language of God's command in both stories is eerily similar. In the opening story God says to him לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ - Go for yourself from your land. In the Akeidah, the command is לֶךְ־לְךָ אֶל־אֶרֶץ הַמֹּרִיָּה – Go for yourself to the land of Moriah. And in both cases the response is silence.

I dwell on these examples to make a point. In both the cases of Sodom and Gomorrah and of the revelation of Isaac's birth and inheritance, Abraham objects. In neither case, however, is Abraham being asked to do anything. God is merely providing Abraham information. In fact, in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, the text makes this point explicitly when God says הַמֲכַסֶּה אֲנִי מֵאַבְרָהָם אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי עֹשֶׂה – shall I hide from Abraham that which I will do?

But when God issues a command to Abraham, he does it. And he usually does it in silence. So to my mind, the question isn't why does Abraham object to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah but is silent with regard to the sacrifice of Isaac. The cases are not analagous. The real question is why does Abraham comply with virtually every commandment – regardless of how those commandments will pain him physically, emotionally, or both – in silence?

The answer to that question is, I believe, that Abraham loves God. He loves Him with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his being.

Well if this is love, you may be thinking, it is love at its most perverse. For certainly true love – healthy love – cannot be revolting and immoral. Is not love the desire to possess and be united with that which is good and beautiful? That desire is indeed how the Greeks defined love. But, as Professor Simon May argues in his book Love: A History, that is not how the Hebrew bible understands it. As he persuasively argues, our scripture's understanding of love is as the emotion most intimately connected to the strongest human need: the need to find a place for oneself that anchors us in this wide world. Those people or things that we truly love are who or what define who we are, and thus give our lives a sense of purpose and meaning. That which we love gives us our place in the world.

Think about how this idea plays out in Abraham's story. Though God promises him that his descendents will inherit the land of Canaan, from the time he is commanded to leave his land, his birthplace, his fathers house, until the day he dies, Abraham quite literally has no place on earth that he can call his own. גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב אָנֹכִי עִמָּכֶם – I am a stranger and soujourner among you, he tells the Hittites as he is forced to bargain for a cave in which to bury his wife. The only thing that gives Abraham a place in the world is his relationship to God. To lose that is to lose everything. The irony here is that for many of us, our relationship to our children is to us what Abraham's relationship to God is to him: that thing for which we will sacrifice anything, including our morality; for to lose it is to lose who we are.

Much of what makes the Akeidah so emotionally shattering is its language. It is so spare that every detail speaks volumes. It isn't merely Abraham who is silent. A three days journey toward Mount Moriah passes without a word of description or emotion. Then, as Abraham and Isaac make their way up the mountain, the story's only dialogue:

And Isaac said to Abraham, his father,

And he said, “My father,”

And he said, “Here I am, my son,”

And he said, “Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

And Abraham said, “God will see to the lamb, my son.”

And the two of them walked on together.

That repetition of the words “his father,” “my father,” “my son,” “my son” is, to my ears at least, heartbreakingly tender. But amazingly enough, for a story about a man off to slaughter his son, the Akeidah is just that: tender. Its tone is set in the very command that sets this tragedy in motion. קַח־נָא אֶת־בִּנְךָ, it begins. That נָא in he middle is a word of entreaty – often translated as "please." "Please take your son." With what pathos that one little word colors this entire story! How did Abraham hear this command? As a thunderbolt from the blue? Or perhaps as a gentle whisper: "Please take, your son, your only one, the one you love, Isaac."

Which raises what is perhaps the most startling and maybe even redeeming point of this story. If Abraham is willing to sacrifice his son at God's commandment because he loves God and finds his place in the world through Him, then God loves Abraham too and for precisely the same reason. For it is indeed through Abraham and his descendents that God has found a home among the peoples of the world.

It may seem strange – perhaps even to some, distateful – to think of the Akeidah as a love story. That is because we think of love as something beautiful and good. But love doesn't have to be either. What it has to be is grounding. It has to tell us who we are. Think of the famous closing words of the bible's greatest love story, the Song of Songs: שִׂימֵנִי כַחוֹתָם עַל־לִבֶּךָ כַּחוֹתָם עַל־זְרוֹעֶךָ כִּי־עַזָּה כַמָּוֶת אַהֲבָה – Place me as the seal upon your heart, as the seal upon your arm, because love is as fierce as death. Our loved ones mark us. They leave their seal upon us and, through it, they affirm in us who we are. The Akeidah is a story of love that is as fierce as death. What is so unusual and so powerful about this story is that both parties – both Abraham and God – are the objects of each other's love. Both are looking to ground their existence in the other. So when God says to Abraham קַח־נָא אֶת־בִּנְךָ - Please take your son, what he is really saying to him is שִׂימֵנִי כַחוֹתָם עַל־לִבֶּךָ - place Me as a seal upon your heart. Perhaps that is why we read the Akeidah on this day of remembrance – to remind the One who judges all the earth that we are as a seal on His heart as well.

Sermon for First Day Rosh Hashanah, Beth Israel Synagogue, 1 Tishrei, 5775

These are my eighth High Holidays at Beth Israel. In my first five years here, I have followed the practice of many of my colleagues of reserving one sermon for Israel. After that fifth sermon, a member of the congregation came up to me and said, “Rabbi, it’s obvious that you care very deeply about Israel, but I am not sure why I should. Could you perhaps have a class to teach me why?” I was touched by this request. Indeed, I count it as one of the kindest things anyone has asked of me as a rabbi.

And of course I held the class; and, astonishingly enough, it was the best attended adult education course I have offered here. For five weeks we studied the Jewish people’s history and its connection to the land, the history of the land itself, the forces that impelled the Jewish people off of it 2000 years ago, and the forces that compelled them to return in the last century and a half. But on the sixth week, I could no longer hide behind history. I had to answer the question posed to me; the question that had become the course's title: Why Care About Israel.

There is part of me that wants to respond to that question in the same way that Victor Laszlo responds to Rick Blaine when asked whether his fight against the Nazis is worth it: “You might as well question why we breathe,” he says. At first, it seemed astonishing that the question should be asked at all. But when I tried to answer it, I discovered that the truly astonishing thing is how difficult it is to do so. In order to show you the difficulty, let me expand the question. Here it is in its long form:

I am a parent and a professional in my work. I live in Wallingford Connecticut, a small, middle-class city with a very small Jewish population. I am a member of the synagogue there because, in a largely Christian town, I want my children to have a sense of their Jewish identity. But I am also a member because I feel this ancient faith of mine has something to teach me about how I should live my own life - and I am trying my best to live a good and meaningful life.

Israel is very far away. What I know about it is what I see on the news, and what I see on the news is mostly bad. Arabs killing Jews, Jews killing Arabs, and I can’t really tell one side from the other. The problems that lead to incessant war seem intractable; who am I to sort them through? I have no desire to visit the place and, counting pennies as we all are these days, no easy means of doing so if I did. Why should I care about Israel?

This is one very hard question. Israel is indeed far away and we are connected to it not by some tangible dependence but rather by vague ideas of a common interest and common history. Painful as it might be to contemplate, if Israel were to cease to exist, it is hard to see how our own lives would change.

So in the class, I tried answering the question by narrowing the distance. Israelis, I told them, are just like us. They live in a free, democratic society. They are hard working, innovative, and want to get ahead. They want peace just like all free people want peace – so they can get on with the business of living. To that end, they have all the institutions of freedom – courts that administer justice, a press that is vibrant with controversy and dissent, and a government that reflects the ever-evolving will of its people. Beyond that, we share a history that goes back nearly 4000 years. And we share values, particularly our belief in the sanctity and dignity of human life.

My goal with this answer was to make Israelis seem less like foreigners with a strange language and intrusive customs, and more like the members of our family that they, in fact, are. I failed. The class greeted my argument largely with silence. It was not the silence of profound insight. Rather, it was the silence that says “is that all you got?”

And in fact, I myself was underwhelmed with this answer. Something I knew, was missing: something that could not be found in economic statistics or political theories; something not of the head, but of the heart. So perhaps the best way to answer the question “why should you care about Israel?” is by telling you why I do.

As many of you know, I did not go to religious school as a child. We belonged to no synagogue; I had no bar mitzvah. Unlike most Jews who hem and haw about the matter by saying that they are not very observant, my father was an avowed atheist. I idolized my father, which of course made me an atheist too. But despite my evolving hostility toward religion, somehow the State of Israel entered my consciousness. It entered there when I was nine-years old and Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic games in Munich. It moved still further into my consciousness a year later when Egypt and Syria nearly destroyed it on Yom Kippur, 1973. I took a giddy kind of adolescent male pride in Israel’s daring raid that rescued 102 hostages held by Palestinian terrorists in Entebbe, Uganda in 1976. I felt deflated the following year when Menachem Begin became Prime Minister and everyone said he would never make peace. And then I felt chastened the next year when he did just that – giving back the Sinai peninsula to earn a peace with Egypt. Through all these events, my Jewish identity - bereft of any religious component - blossomed and grew. These acts of heroism in the face of evil, these risks for peace with a former enemy, were being done by Jews. And I was a Jew.

To that point my consciousness of Israel was associated mostly with a feeling of pride: pride in its courage, pride in its daring, pride in its audacity, both in war and in peace. But in 1981, a new and even stronger emotion crept in. That year, in a secret and audacious raid, Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor the French were building for Saddam Hussein in Iraq. I was thrilled. To me it was, like the Entebbe raid, another example of Israel’s genius and daring. But the world didn’t see it that way. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called Israel’s raid “a grave breach of international law.” And The New York Times, true to its form of getting all-things-Israel precisely wrong, called it “an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.”

But the meaning of all this criticism did not hit home until the following year with the outbreak of the Lebanon War. Throughout the 1970's, the Palestinian Liberation Organization or PLO, turned Lebanon – particularly Southern Lebanon – into an armed base for attacking Israel with shells and rockets and tanks. Israel had little choice but to strike at this burgeoning threat. As Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said at the time, “no sovereign state can tolerate indefinitely the buildup along its borders of a military force dedicated to its destruction . . .” Israel invaded Southern Lebanon in June of 1982. Initial success led to an effort to drive the PLO from Lebanon all together. That is when the war bogged down and opinion turned against the Jewish state. From all corners Israel was being attacked as an aggressor. Even Jews, even Israelis were joining in on the condemnation.

I was incredulous. How could you condemn a country for defending its citizens against an enemy bent on destroying it? What other country would be condemned for acting the way Israel had? Indeed, what country would not be condemned if it failed to act as Israel had? As you can tell, it did not take long for my incredulity to turn to indignation. I had no problem holding Israel to a higher standard. But to say that Israel's standard should be self-sacrifice rather than self-defense struck me as the height of naivety. At least I thought it was naivety at the time.

Sadly, the history I watched unfold in Lebanon in 1982 became the pattern of behavior in the decades that have followed. The terrorists who surround Israel commit some outrage – a suicide bombing, a cross-border kidnapping, indiscriminate rocket fire – and the world mouths its sympathy for the Jewish State. The world loves to be seen as sympathetic when Jews are being killed. But let Israel defend itself and the world's moral calculus changes. We saw this in the Palestinian terror war of 2000-2004 where Israel was internationally condemned for building a fence to keep suicide bombers out. We saw it in the second Lebanon war of 2006 where international pressure forced Israel to shut down its operations before achieving its objectives. We saw it in the first Gaza war of 2012 where the United Nations accused Israel of war crimes – a charge its commission's Jewish chairman subsequently renounced. And we saw it this summer where the world placed at Israel's feet the body of every dead Palestinian in Gaza – despite the fact that Hamas rejected or broke every cease-fire that Israel accepted. Through it all, my indignation at the world's heedless naivety grew. Then, at some point – I don't know when for sure – I realized that what Israel was facing was not heedless naivety at all. For who could be so naïve as to take the side of an organization whose avowed purpose was to destroy the Jewish state and every Jew living in it; that conducts summary executions on busy, city streets; that uses its own citizens as shields for its weaponry. This wasn't heedless naivety. This wasn't even hatred of the State of Israel. This was antisemitism. This was hatred of Jews, pure and simple.

Just look at what they are saying out there on the street of almost any supposedly civilized nation. With all the oppressive regimes that rule their people through terror – including in Gaza; with all the wars and genocides that mark their dead in the tens and hundreds of thousands, what is the one country that evokes angry, sometimes violent protest in France, in Germany, in Poland, in India, in Great Britain, in Sweden, in Norway, in Chile, in Italy, in Argentina, in Australia, in Columbia, in Canada, in Denmark, in Austria, in Tunisia and here in the United States? And in not a few of those protests they are shouting "Death to the Jews," and "Jews to the Gas." These are not protests against Israel. They are protests against Jews. They are protests against you.

As you can tell, I am passionate on this subject. But then again, we Jews are a passionate people. And nothing evokes that passion like our sense of justice. Think of Abraham arguing with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah: הֲשֹׁפֵט כָּל־הָאָרֶץ לֹא יַעֲשֶׂה מִשְׁפָּט – will not the Judge of all the world do justice? Think of Moses, desperately defending the Israelites after the sin of the golden calf - שׁוּב מֵחֲרוֹן אַפֶּךָ וְהִנָּחֵם עַל־הָרָעָה לְעַמֶּךָ - return from Your anger and relent from the evil toward Your people. Think of Jeremiah at the end of the book of Lamentations, accepting God's punishment but accusing Him as well - קָצַפְתָּ עָלֵינוּ עַד־מְאֹד – You have raged against us enough! Even the story of Jonah is one of a man whose passion for justice is so great he seeks to block God's mercy.

So what is it that evokes your passion? What is it that causes you – in your own way – to rage against the world? What would cause you to rage even against God? Surely there must be something inside you that evokes what can only be called righteous indignation. And surely the scapegoating and villianizing of Jews must be worthy of that passionate response, because if it isn't, then something is missing from your Jewish soul – something you have to find in order to become whole.

I care about Israel because I am a Jew. And you must do the same.

Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Evening, Beth Israel Synagogue, 1 Tishrei, 5775

Thoughts about High Holiday sermon topics probably start to creep into my mind right around the time the Pesach dishes are being stowed away for another year. By the beginning of summer I know what my subject will be for at least one or two sermons, and I have a strong sense about the rest. In part, this is due to a pattern I try and follow every year. The sermon, I believe, has to reflect the tone of the day. So on Rosh Hashanah – when the year and the holidays are new – I try and give a sermon with a purpose to it – an exhortation either to some form of action or conviction. This is the sermon to which the verb “preach” - a word that I find a bit creepy – best applies. Yom Kippur, on the other hand, is a time of deep introspection and so, on that day, I try to give what I now call the “thinky” sermon – the one more conducive to rumination and reflection.

This year, the sermons came together later than in previous years. Part of that is no doubt due to the relative lateness of the holidays. In time, though, I figured out what I wanted to say on both days of Rosh Hashanah, as well as the two sermonizing services of Yom Kippur. What has stumped me has been this service.

I think of this evening's sermon as the one that sets the tone for the spiritual work that we each must individually do over these ten days. It is also, with the exception of the mincha/ne'ilah service on Yom Kippur, the most intimate. Many of you here tonight will be here for every service, and so I feel a kind of kinship with you. It makes me want to put something of myself into this sermon – to open up to you the emotions I am feeling on this day of remembrance and at this season of repentance. For me, these emotions tend to be pretty similar from year to year, and so I was somewhat disappointed, though not at all surprised, when I realized - after the fact - that the sermon I gave on this night last year was remarkably similar to one I had given just a few years earlier. In both I spoke about the emotions of size and significance that are stirred up in me on our annual family trips to North Carolina's Outer Banks. I have spent a fair amount of time in New York City this summer – including a trip to the top of the Empire State Building – and for a while I thought about offering my reflections on visiting that remarkable place. But as I thought about what those reflections were, I realized I would just wind up giving the Outer Banks sermon yet again, this time with an urban twist to it.

I have started and stopped on this sermon numerous times – including one version that I decided was more appropriate for Purim then the High Holidays. I kept thinking to myself, when the other sermons are written and your mind is clear, it will come to you. It didn't. As late as yesterday I decided to scrap the whole plan and lead a discussion group tonight – an idea I have been toying with for some time now. Yet what would not leave me was the feeling that I had something to say to you – something that I needed to say to you, tonight. I just could not figure out what that thing was.

It hit me this morning. I was looking at the front page of The Jewish Week, which is New York City's equivalent of our Jewish Ledger. The lead headline read “Gaza War Pushes Israel, Reluctantly, Onto Holiday Bima.” In the article, more than a dozen rabbis were confessing that this summer's Gaza war was forcing them to to talk about Israel and they were nervous about doing so. Whatever they said, they well knew, was likely to anger – even outrage – a large portion of their congregation. So they were trying to frame their words to both express what they felt they needed to say, but also to keep the dialogue open with those who will disagree.

How astonishing! I finished my Israel sermon – the sermon I will give tomorrow morning – nearly three weeks ago. And ever since, I have been tinkering with it not to tone it down, but to try to make it stronger. I have no fear of angering you with what I will say tomorrow. For the most part, I have no such fear because the majority of you agree with me – which is a good thing because my opinions about Israel are right. But there is also something very upsetting about being a rabbi who can't make his congregation mad at him. Even last year when I told you that you all stink at praying and you had better learn how to do it right, no one came up to me and said “Mind your own damn business, rabbi, I can pray better than you!” What kind of Jews are that polite?

There is an irony to this shul – an irony that plays out on both a superficial and a more profound level. In the Jewish Week article, one rabbi said of his holiday sermons “I plan to speak about the inability to speak to each other about things we disagree on.” The superficial irony is that I don't have to speak about our inability to speak when we disagree because we don't disagree – at least not to my face. The deeper irony is that if we did disagree, I would not have to sermonize to you about that either. We could just talk. That's why we have lunch together after services on Rosh Hashanah – so we can talk. That's why I encourage you all to visit me here in the hours after morning services on Yom Kippur – so we can talk. I like to talk to you about important things. To me, its the best part of being your rabbi.

The realization that I am not the kind of rabbi who ever has to worry that his congregation will hate him is what finally shook from my brain as to what I want to say to you. The last couple of months here have been hard: resignations, people moving away, people moving on. These changes are leaving real voids. We are filling those voids, but so far, incompletely and at a terrible strain to our president. Part of me sees opportunity in all this. Perhaps we are going through that darkest hour that leads to the brightest dawn. And in truth, I have been inspired by many of you these past few weeks. I have been inspired by those of you who have who have taken on the work of filling those voids. And I have been inspired by those of you who have, through your actions, shown a determination never to give in.

But I keep hearing in my head the words of the poet Anthony Hecht, whose poem Words for the Day of Atonement are quoted in the Reform movement's mahzor: “Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.” Assuming the voids do get filled, what do we hope to accomplish beyond survival?

Tomorrow in my sermon, I will tell you the history of how I became so passionate about Israel. Left unsaid will be the story of how that passion awakened another: a passion for this ancient faith of ours. For I have come to believe that, lurking under a surface of rote observance and mechanical action, hiding behind the ignorance in which we have been raised and the prejudices we have inherited, lurks the most astonishing, powerful, life affirming and meaning creating system of living and thinking and acting. It will take but a little work to get us there. But it will take such work from a lot of us, working together with the sense of purpose that breeds passion. If we could, in this throw-back of a building, in the middle of a city that is indifferent to our survival, create a model of Jewish thought, and purpose and vibrancy, we will have done something of enduring worth. We will have done something worthy of more than just survival. Indeed, we will have done something worthy of blessing. Somehow on this night, the accomplishment seems at the same time farther away and closer than ever.

This is the message that I wanted to deliver especially to you who are here tonight because you are the ones who can hear it understand. My prayer for all of us is that the trials through which this shul is now passing will awaken a sense of purpose to our work that goes beyond the need to survive. May that purpose be a fuel to our passion and may our passion lead us to the days when we yell and scream and argue with each other because we care so much. The Mishnah teaches us not to fear such arguments because they are for the sake of heaven. And everything we do for the sake of heaven is in fact for the strength of our souls.

Sermon for Yom Kippur Morning, Beth Israel Synagogue, 10 Tishrei 5774

I am a long-time fan of Paul Simon, but every time I try to impose some ethnic pride on his decades-long musical accomplishments by reminding myself or others that he is Jewish, my older daughter Sarah begins to list for me all the Christian imagery that appears in his music.  Early on he set part of the Sermon on the Mount to music.  His works have included imagery like crosses in ballparks and Jews traveling through the Blood of Christ Mountains of New Mexico.  And of course, he famously assured Mrs. Robinson that Jesus loved her more than she will know; which, oddly enough, is sort of the subject of this sermon.

But I raise Paul Simon here not to discuss his personal theology but to relate an observation I once heard him make about the difficulties of song writing.  Write a song too much from one direction, he said, and you risk making it sentimental.  Write it too much from a different direction and it risks being what he calls  too “thinky.”  If you have to make a mistake in one direction or another, he advises, better to make the song sentimental than thinky. 

Well, I can tell you from personal experience that what is true of song writing is also true of sermon writing.  But my own temptation is to err on the side of thinky.  In fact, I gave a sermon on this day last year about what I considered the dangers of sermons that appeal to – and perhaps manipulate – congregants' emotions.

All of which serves as a warning to you that you are about to listen to a thinky sermon.  I know that after three hours of praying, a lot of you are tired and low-blood sugared and in no mood to think.  Consider it then a part of the affliction of  the soul you are supposed to suffer on this day of atonement.  And in my own feeble defense for what I am about to inflict upon you, the subject I am going to ask you to think about is itself a sentiment.  I am going to ask you to think about love.

Our Torah, of course, is the source of two of religion's most profound statements about love.  They come in the form of commandments.  Leviticus 19 commands us וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ  - And you will love your neighbor as yourself.  And then later in Deuteronomy 6, perhaps even more famously, וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶךָ - And you will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all you soul and with all your might.  Nevertheless, it is Christianity, not Judaism, that has come down to modern culture as the religion of love.  Indeed, for many Christians, it is their notion of God’s love - as opposed to His strict justice - that forms the great divide between their faith and the one from which it sprang.  My goal in this sermon is not to, in any way, challenge Christianity’s understanding of its doctrines or its teachings.  It is, rather, to place before you some of the differences between how Judaism and Christianity understand the meaning of the word love, and how Judaism’s meaning informs its teachings.  My exploration of this subject has proved a revelation to me - an experience that has deepened my faith.  For this reason, I am going to risk preaching a thinky sermon to try and share some of that experience with you.

The Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI began his reign by publishing a scholarly Encyclical Letter entitled Deus Caritas Est - God is Love.  The title, I have learned, comes from the First Letter of John: “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.”  Christian scholars have, down through the ages, created a rich and lively debate about the meaning, the significance and the limits of love, both human and divine.  I have not the expertise nor, frankly, the desire to plunge into this debate.  But the idea that God is love is very powerful and very pervasive and therefore it has real implications both for Jews as Jews and especially for Jews in dialogue with Christians.  I therefore want to take just a few minutes to ferret out its meaning.

Interestingly, Pope Benedict traces the idea that God is love not to the New Testament, but to what he calls the Old Testament, that is to say, the Jewish Bible, theתנך .  He traces it, in fact, to a verse from the Prophet הושע.  The scene finds Israel once again refusing to repent of its sins and follow God’s ways.  Yet God does not destroy Israel or leave it to its deserved fate.  “How can I give you up, O Ephraim!  How can I hand you over, O Israel! . . . My heart recoils within Me, My compassion grows warm and tender.  I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst.”  The idea that Pope Benedict finds in these verses is that God’s love for His people is so great that it overwhelms His identity as God.  As he puts it, “it turns God against himself, his love against his justice.”

To Pope Benedict, this idea of God’s identity as God being overwhelmed by His love for His people finds the ultimate expression in Jesus Christ.   In Jesus, God makes Himself flesh and blood - He gives himself up, in other words, to suffering and death - so that He can save the people He loves so much.  He writes, Christ’s “death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him… By contemplating the pierced side of Christ, we can understand the starting-point of this Encyclical Letter: 'God is love'”

As Jews, we need to pause here for a moment just to admire the power of this idea.  The God who is the creator of heaven and earth and who exists outside His creation is fundamentally distant and beyond our experience.  But we all need love.  We all need to give love and to receive love.  To say, therefore, that God is love is to say that God is within the realm of human experience.  Indeed the work of many a Christian theologian is to show how humans, through divine grace and through the cultivation of their own powers to love, can approach the Divine.  To say, as the Christians do, that God is love is to provide humans with a potential for intimacy with God that in Judaism is largely reserved for mystics and saints. 

Before, though, we get to the Jewish understanding of love, we need to spend a moment and consider another notion of love; one that is perhaps even more powerful and more pervasive in our modern world than the idea that God is love.  It is the idea that love is god.

Professor Simon May of King’s College, London, has written a book entitled Love: A History.  In it he argues that, as religion has retreated in our world, love has taken its place as the only real god.  He lists some of the key beliefs that many of us share about love:

Love is unconditional …
Love is fundamentally selfless…
Love is benevolent and harmonious …
Love is eternal …
Love redeems life's losses and sufferings …

As a further nudge to his contention that love has become god to us, Professor May offers the humorous observation that “There is hardly a humanist funeral that, having begun with a defiant statement that it is a godless celebration, doesn't seek comfort in the love that ‘survives’ the deceased person and thus gives him a measure of immortality.”

What shocked me about Professor May’s observations was the realization that I too have made love into a god.  I too, have thought of and spoken of love as unconditional and eternal.  I too, who prays to the Lord as גאל ישראל - the Redeemer of Israel - have spoken of love’s redeeming powers.  Until I read Professor May’s critique, I had no idea of how much I had invested love with powers more properly belonging to the sphere of the divine.  And yet when you think about it, it all makes sense.  We, who have a harder and harder time of bringing faith or belief into our conversation, nevertheless need some place to put our hopes and fears and desires for something more than what we can see.  Why not place that transcendent power in something we all crave so intently?  Why not make love a god?

So what is a Jew to make of all this?  On the one hand, our Christian neighbors want us to know that God is love.  On the other hand, our larger society wants us to know that love is god.  As the people who declare יי אלוהינו יי אחד there is surely no way for us to affirm this latter sentiment.  But what about the idea that God is love?  Can a Jew make such an assertion?  As soon as I asked myself the question, I knew immediately that the answer was no.  And I knew also just how a Jew would complete the sentence “God is (blank).” 

At the beginning of the Book of Exodus, Moses meets God at the burning bush.  Charged with delivering God’s people from Egyptian bondage, Moses seeks some way in which he can identify the Lord to the Israelites.  “Look,” he says “I will come to the Israelites and I will say to them ‘the god of your fathers sent me to you,’ and they will say to me, ‘what’s His name?’  What will I say to them?”  To which God responds, “I will Be that I will Be.”  “Thus you will say to the Israelites “I will Be sent me to you.’”

To the challenge “God is (blank)” I believe the only response is that “God is God.”  To say more is to place limitations on God.  If we wish to be perhaps a little less cryptic, we might say “God is the Creator of Heaven and Earth and all that is contained therein.”  All of which is to say that God is real.  God is, in fact, the ultimate reality in that God, through His creative power, has given rise to everything.

And you will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all you soul and with all your might.  If God is the ultimate reality, then we are commanded to relate to this reality through love.  But to understand what this means, we have to understand what love is.

This will strike a lot of you as funny.  Love is one of those words we use all the time.  Every one of us believes he or she knows what it means.  But my guess is if I really pressed you, you would have a hard time defining it.  You would have even a harder time if I asked you to define it and avoid using terms like eternal and unconditional and benevolent and redemptive. 

Professor May offers us a definition of love.  Its a definition, he believes, that comes straight out of the Torah and its commandments to love.  Compared to the claims that make love a god, his definition is quite modest.  But when you really think about it, what it says about love is startlingly profound.  Love, he says, is what gives us a home in the world.

Take a few moments to think about that.  It is through love - it is through the things and the people that we love - that we find for ourselves a home in the world; a place where we can be who we are as we want ourselves to be.  Such a definition means that love is neither unconditional nor eternal; we love someone only so long they help secure our place in this world.  It means too that love does not have to be either redemptive or selfless.  Indeed, our beloved does not have to return our feelings to the same extent or even at all.

The more I have thought about this for myself, the more I know it to be true.  Much as I want to ascribe mystical power to my attachment to my wife, my children, my family, I have come to understand that it is really through loving them that I have created a place for myself in the world.  Ask me what is dear to me and I will tell you that it is being a devoted and thoughtful husband, a wise and patient father, a concerned and present brother and son and, yes, a caring and thoughtful rabbi.  If you ask me who I am, I will now tell you that I am who and how I love. 

Now here comes the really hard thinky part.  Take these three ideas - the idea that God is the ultimate reality, the idea that love is what gives us our place in the world, and the idea that we are commanded to relate to God through love - and put them all together.  What you come up with is this: that our place in the world comes from our attachment to the ultimate reality.  Our place in the world comes from our love of God.

For me, this is a truly profound thought.  My own religious struggle is not a fear that I won’t be redeemed in the world to come.  It is the fear that nothing in this life matters.  It is the fear, scarily summed up by the physicist Steven Weinberg who said that the more the universe becomes explicable, the more it also seems to be pointless.  This, to me, is the most despairing notion there can be.

What a miracle, then, to discover that Judaism’s first and foremost teaching has been - since its very beginning - a bold contradiction of that despair.  There in the command to love God with all one’s heart, soul and might is really a command to find your place in the world through attachment to the one true reality - through God.  Of course just the fact that the Torah commands such behavior doesn’t make it true.  But I find it truly miraculous that this most ancient religion exists to combat this most modern fear.  And that is enough to give me hope and faith.

I admire my Christian friends who have taken this notion of God’s love and transformed it into a way for people to come close to the divine.  Judaism, of course, developed its own version of this theology in the notion of  עולם הבאה - the world to come.  I hope and pray that all this is true.  But, for now at least, I am content with this more modest idea about love: that love is the thing that makes us feel at home in the world;  that love for our families gives us our identity, our sense of purpose, and our feeling of peace and contentment in this vast universe of ours; and that ultimately, that it is our love of God that gives us the confidence that we are attached to something greater than ourselves, thus filling our lives with meaning.

Sermon for Yom Kippur Evening, Beth Israel Synagogue, 10 Tishrei 5774

A couple of months ago, skimming through one of the on-line movie services to which we subscribe, I happened upon an Israeli documentary, הדירה - translated as The Flat - as in apartment.  The film was made by Arnon Goldfinger, a screen-writer and director.  When his 98-year-old grandmother died, something told him to bring his movie camera with him when he and his mother Hannah went to clean out her flat.  What unfolded is a remarkable story of the Holocaust, of personal deception, of the power of the truth and, perhaps, of its limits as well.

Growing up in Israel in the 1960’s and 1970’s, his grandmother’s flat was always an exotic place to Arnon.  "When I was a kid,” he writes, “I liked to come here.   Once a week I’d cross the streets of Tel Aviv, climb up the stairs, and find myself in Berlin.  My grandmother lived here for 70 years as if she had never left Germany.  Despite her years in the Holy Land, she never mastered Hebrew and I didn’t want to learn German.  So we’d sit and chat in English over apple strudel and Swiss chocolate.”

Already, of course, Arnon’s story is curious.  How can refugees from Nazi Germany maintain a Germanic home and a Germanic lifestyle after being forced to flee for their lives?  But the story quickly becomes even more curious when we learn that Arnon’s grandparents, whose names were Kurt and Gerda Tuchler, originally travelled to Palestine in the company of an SS officer named Leopold von Mildenstein.   In the effort to make Germany Judenrein - that is to say, Jew free- von Mildenstein advocated the mass immigration of Germany’s Jews to Palestine.  In 1933, he and his wife would set off to tour the land in the company of Arnon Goldfinger’s grandparents. 

As Arnon and his family dig through his grandmother’s collected belongings, he finds copies of one of the most virulent Nazi newspapers, Der Angriff - The Attack.  The papers contain a series of articles by von Mildenstein about his travels in Palestine.  Their purpose is to glorify the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland as a way of enticing Jews to leave Germany.   As Arnon keeps digging, he finds a photo album containing pictures of his grandparents and the von Mildensteins travelling through Palestine together.

Arnon confronts his mother Hannah with the newspaper articles and the photos of her parents with this Nazi couple.  Embarrassed by it all, she admits she knows nothing about this event in their past.  As he continues to question her, she becomes more sullen.  This von Mildenstein apparently had more knowledge about Jews than any other Nazi, and his source of information was her parents.  Didn’t this interest her?  “Its interesting,” she says quietly, “but again I am not going to start looking into it.  If I happen upon it, fine.  What good will it do me?” she continues.  “Will it make me see them differently?  I had the burden of living with them.  I don’t really care what happened years ago.”

Its moments like this that make Arnon’s movie so fascinating to me.  He has his mother cornered.  Here her parents were escorting Nazis around Palestine and she claims no great interest.  How is this possible?  What child is not interested in the great and distinctive details of their parents’ lives?  As you watch Hannah’s face, you understand that the lack of interest she is expressing is really a cover for her fear.  She’s afraid to know this part of her parents lives.  And honestly, who among us wouldn’t be?

But Arnon’s story gets far more curious than this.  His grandparents, Kurt and Gerda, would spend the war in the safety of Palestine.   But Gerda’s mother would stay in Berlin and be murdered by the Nazis in 1942.  Oddly, Gerda would tell her daughter Hannah nothing about the fate of her grandmother.  Even more oddly, Gerda and Kurt would, after the war and in spite of her mother’s murder, frequently return to Germany and to Berlin where they would continue to socialize and maintain a friendship with the Nazi von Mildenstein and his wife.

Finding a phone number for Mrs. von Mildenstein among his grandmother’s belongings, Arnon calls it on a whim and winds up talking to her daughter.   Trying to understand why his grandparents would maintain this relationship even after the war, Arnon travels to Germany to meet with the daughter - Edda Miltz and her husband Harald.    Edda, of course, sees nothing odd in the idea that a Jewish couple that had fled Germany would stay in touch with such wonderful, intelligent, educated and sophisticated people as her parents.  Arnon struggles with how to bring up her father’s past, but Edda has her own narrative.  Her father’s Nazi activities took place in the early 1930’s and consisted mainly of trying to encourage Jews to emigrate to Palestine. 

The truth about Leopold von Mildenstein, however, is far more sordid.  He joined the Nazi party in 1929 and joined the SS in 1932.  In 1933 he indeed travelled to Palestine in the company of Arnon’s grandparents and, upon returning, was placed in charge of the SS’s department on Jewish affairs.  From there he advocated the solution to the Jewish question through mass emigration to Palestine - a position that fell out of favor when the SS realized it could not take place fast enough.  Von Mildenstein was replaced as head of the SS’s Jewish department in 1936, and, some time later, was succeeded by a man he brought into the department, Adolf Eichmann.  He served out the war working in the propaganda ministry of  Josef Goebbels. 

Just as Arnon’s mother Hannah carefully avoided prying too much into her parents’ continuing association with Nazis, so too did Edda Miltz von Mildenstein avoid prying too much into her father’s Nazi past.  As he learns the details of that past, Arnon confronts Edda with them, just as he confronted his mother.  The results are even more painful to watch.  When told that he has uncovered evidence of her father’s continued Nazi affiliation, Edda denies it is even possible.  “He was not in Berlin,” she says.  Like a prosecutor, Arnon shows her her father’s handwritten resume where he himself documents his continued Nazi affiliation throughout the war.   Trying to deny the document’s significance she says “that is like a skeleton… If I find the pieces I can patch them to that.  But not more than that.”  “Don’t you want to know the past?” he asks her.  Edda, trying hard to maintain her composure responds, “I want to learn around it.  But I’d like to , preferably, see different sides of it as well, if that is possible.”  She pauses and then, as if scared of what will happen next, she asks Arnon “Anything else?” and then lowers her eyes as if to avoid what might be the next blow.

This, for me, is the most uncomfortable part of the film.  In trying to understand his grandparents, Arnon stumbls across Edda and foists himself into her life - with a movie camera trailing him, no less.  She responds graciously to his inquiries and now, in return, he takes it upon himself to rewrite her personal narrative of her family in a most unpleasant and indeed shameful way.  He does so in the name of truth, but I find myself wondering whether the truth is worth it.

Long before Al Gore popularized the term, most of us learned that the truth is often inconvenient, and sometimes embarrassing and even painful.  But we learn too that truth is extraordinarily powerful and to deny it to yourself or someone else is to rob that person of the ability to be an agent of change in his or her own life.  Looking critically at my own life, I find that my willingness to foil the truth through out-and-out lying is not what it used to be.  Usually I find that admitting to a fault is less costly than being caught in a lie.  And when that isn’t the case, I find the prospect of dealing with my own guilty conscience scary enough to keep me honest.

No, nowadays, my preferred method of foiling the truth is to avoid facing it.  I too often put off dealing with problems in the hope that they will go away before they go nuclear.  I do this now especially when I know how much the truth will hurt others.  In my days as a businessman, I would try to convince myself that I hadn’t given the under-performing employee enough of a chance, or that I was misjudging the situation, or that he had talents that were equally useful to the ones his job really required - anything to avoid having to fire him.  These days I try to convince myself that that pain will just go away by itself, or that the negative numbers on the financial report will turn around next month. 

Intellectually I know that the truth - be it inconvenient, or embarrassing or even shameful - has a power all its own that cannot be permanently suppressed.  Best to deal with it sooner rather than later.  Sometimes I live up to this ideal, and sometimes I do not.  But I never view my own efforts to avoid the truth as anything other than failure on my part.  Indeed I see the High Holy Days as the last reasonable chance of owning up to those failures and confronting the truth. 

That said, I have come to view the Holocaust as such a singular event that I am not sure which, if any, of the normal rules of life apply to it.  At one point in his film, Arnon visits with his grandmother’s last living friend, a woman named Gertrude Kino.  He asks her what she makes of Gerda never telling her own daughter about the murder of her mother.  Gertrude answers the question with a question: “Why do only third generation Germans ask questions?  The second generation didn’t ask what happened.”  She stares at him and then adds, sympathetically, “You don’t understand, and I’m glad you don’t understand.”

What doesn’t Arnon understand?  What don’t we, who are even further separated from the Holocaust understand?   Just as the peak of Mount Everest stands at the utmost limits of human survival, I suspect the Holocaust exists at the utmost limits of human understanding.  As the event fades from immediate memory, those of us who try to understand do so in our normal way: we investigate, we apply reason, we ask questions, we seek the truth.  Indeed, we believe we should seek the truth no matter how painful that truth might be.  And yet, as we try to seek the truth from those generations closer to the event than we, we find that truth can not only be embarrassing and painful, it can be as cruel as the original act itself.  Thus it is with perhaps the most painful question the Holocaust has left in its wake: why didn’t more of us fight back?  The only answer possible - at least for now - is that what happened in the ghettos and in the transports and in the camps was of such singular moment that the normal rules of life don’t apply. 

Looking at Hannah’s face and at Edda’s face as Arnon confronts them with their parents’ past, I see something being shattered.  Deep down, and without Arnon telling her, Hannah knows and is ashamed that her parents continued to see themselves as German - and protect their German identity -  even after the Holocaust.  Deep down, and without Arnon telling her, Edda knows that her father was a Nazi through-and-through.   Has Arnon liberated these women by exposing what they knew deep down, or has he stripped from them that last fig leaf that allowed them to keep faith with their past?  Was it, perhaps, their fate to live their lives both haunted and in denial, or has he given them a chance to reclaim something their parents’ had stolen from them?  I, for one, don’t know.

על חטא שחטאנו לפניך בכחש ובכזב - For the sin that we have sinned against You by lying and by deceit. על חטא שחטאנו לפניך בזלזול הורים ומורים - For the sin that we have sinned against You by disrespecting parents and teachers.  These confessional prayers that we have offered this evening are also the heritage of Hannah Goldfinger, born in Berlin to Kurt and Gerda Tuchler, mother of Israeli film maker Arnon Goldfinger.  To the extent that these confessions capture universal human failings, they must also be, in some way, the possession of Edda Miltz von Mildenstein, daughter of a dedicated SS officer and Nazi propagandist.   Perhaps this is what the Torah means when it says it will visit the sins of the parents upon the children to the third and fourth generation: that the nature of those parental sins will deny their children the sense of שלמות - the sense of wholeness - that comes from being able to confess all your sins, rather than being forced to choose among them.   For indeed, that is how I have come to see Hannah and Edda - as women forced to choose between respecting their parents’ memories and the truth. 

For those of us who have come here tonight seeking that sense of שלמות that comes through confrontation with our past and confession of our failings, let us add to our prayers a word of הודיה, of thankfullness, for being able to find such peace.  Inconvenient, embarrassing, painful and even shameful as we may find confronting the truth, at least it offers us a chance to heal.  May we, on this day, through our fast, through our prayers and through our reflections, find such healing.  And may we feel grateful that for us, the truth knows no limits.

Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Morning, Beth Israel Synagogue, 1 Tishrei 5774

Prayer, for me, is not primarily a religious duty. It is a life skill.

I have been thinking about prayer a lot lately, and the substance of my thoughts are pretty much expressed those two sentences. So, since I have the pulpit and there’s nothing any of you are willing to do to stop me, let me repeat them:

Prayer, for me, is not primarily a religious duty. It is a life skill.

I have struggled with prayer all my adult life. The first time I felt a strong impulse to pray was in my dorm room my junior year in college. My weekly call home made it clear that my father’s three year struggle with cancer was coming to an end. I hung up, and wanted to talk to God. But I was astonished by my own arrogance. Who was I, who had spent his entire life a self-proclaimed atheist, to ask God to listen to me in this moment of profound distress? What had I ever given to God that would warrant His listening to - let alone answering my - prayers?

And for what exactly would I pray anyway? A miracle? Did I expect one? Did I deserve one? Did my father deserve one? Didn’t far-greater tragedies occur every day of the week to people whose prayers were more deserving of an answer then mine?

In the dark of my dorm room that night I verbalized all those thoughts and more. There was no Hebrew. There were no requests, no words of thanks or words of praise. But I think the words I spoke that night were a prayer anyway. They were a prayer because they brought a measure of solemnity to a profound moment in my life.

This is prayer’s power: its capacity to solemnize – and indeed elevate – life’s profound moments. The starting point of my sermon today is the idea that each of our lives is a sacred undertaking. But as is always the case with sacred works, that sanctity is not always apparent. Most of our days are filled with routine affairs we undertake out of necessity, or habit, or boredom. How often do I find myself staring at a baseball game because I can’t think of anything better to do until bedtime?

But there are times when we sense that a sacred purpose indeed animates our days. That moment in my dorm room was one. But in truth, such moments are not confined to the triumphs and tragedies of our lives. They come much more frequently and much more subtly then we realize. We need to become aware of them. And then we need the ability to acknowledge them. Let me give you a recent example of one such moment in my life.

In July, Terri and I vacationed in St. John. On our way down, a friend of our shul left me a message. He wanted to give me an update on the condition of his wife who has been seriously ill. I returned his call with great trepidation, but his news was all good. Things were looking up for he and his wife and the relief he felt was palpable to me, even through a bad phone connection. I wanted to celebrate his good news.

Next day came word that an acquaintance of ours had died suddenly. Just 60-years-old, he was a man of uncommon energy and warmth and kindness with an outsized personality; a true pillar in the Madison synagogue community.

That night, I stared out from the veranda of our rented house and took in the scene: the darkened hillsides, the lights of the harbor, the vast ocean beyond. Somewhere, a thousand miles away, one family celebrated, while another was devastated. And from where I sat, the world just moved on without skipping a beat. I felt overwhelmed and confused by it all. So I picked up my siddur, and began to pray. And in that act of praying, I took that moment of confusion and brought to it a measure of sanctity. My prayers that evening reminded me that there are entire worlds of meaning and significance that exist beyond my gaze; that my eyes and my perception are, ultimately, not the measure of all things. My prayers. in other words, took away that sense of confusion and despair and replaced it with an assurance that our lives are indeed bigger than we sometimes realize.

Unlike the prayer in my dorm room which was a spontaneous prayer, this is an example of prayer as a life-skill; as an ability developed over years of practice and designed to meet just such occasions. Driving a car is a life-skill. Knowing how to conduct yourself in a confrontation, or at a funeral, or after a fender-bender are all life-skills. Knowing how to work efficiently or the right way to talk to people are life skills. A life-skill is not something you are born with, but a capacity you develop in order to live your life fruitfully and completely.

Which brings me back to my twice stated opening declaration that, to me, prayer is more of a life-skill then it is a religious obligation. Let me add a little nuance to that statement. Prayer in Judaism is a חובה, an obligation. I have, in my life, and certainly through my time in rabbinical school, treated it as an obligation. Had I not done so, I am not sure I could have learned to understand it as the life-skill I now think it actually is. To put it more simply, what I started doing because I felt obliged to, I now do because I think it something that enriches, and indeed gives meaning to my life.

Here’s the problem. With a few exceptions, none of you know how to pray. Oh you may know some prayers and know them in Hebrew. But how many of you know the underlying structure of the prayer service - or know that that underlying structure is exactly the same every day of the year - including Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? How many of you know, without being told, where to sit and where to stand during a service? Or which prayers can only be said in the presence of a minyan? Or which prayers require the highest levels of concentration? Many of you, I know, feel great comfort being here in shul, especially on these High Holy Days. Many of you rejoice in hearing our cantor once again intone the prayers you have known since childhood. These are beautiful, powerful connections and I don't mean to make light of them. But how many of you can take that sense of connection and comfort you feel by being here today and translate it into an something that shapes your understanding of life? For make no mistake about it, that is the aim of prayer - to shape your understanding of life and your place in the world.

I beg you not to take these observations as personal criticisms. I know from direct observation that the obstacles that have been put between you and a meaningful relationship with prayer are tremendous. The evidence is all around you; you can start by looking in your lap. There sits a prayer book meant to be used for all of three days, that is 894 pages long. How can anyone expect you to make sense of such an overflowing and repetitious mass?

Another obstacle in you way to a meaningful relationship with prayer is your lack of exposure to it. This may seem odd given the 894 page prayer book, but Jewish prayer has a definite structure and rhythm that carries it along and imbues it with meaning. When people tell me that they like “the old ways,” and “the way we did it back when I was a kid,” I know they are craving the familiarity that gives their prayer a context of memory and emotion. But really, the connection has to run deeper than that. It has to run to the order of the prayers, to their words, to their rhythm. None of those things have changed in any significant way, even if some of the tunes have.

In truth, Jewish prayer – in its size, its structure and its complexity – reflects a different era in Jewish history. It reflects a time when a Jew's world revolved – at least in part – around the synagogue. There, he or she really learned how to pray. And if they did so out of a sense of religious obligation, it was, nevertheless, a life-skill.

Our lives no longer revolve around the synagogue and the payer books we have been handed down – despite every effort to change that – have failed us in our efforts to make prayer a meaningful part of our lives.

I want to change that.

In my seven years here at Beth Israel, I am most proud of how this shul has become a house of study. We have a large, devoted Torah study group that meets here every Shabbat. Every adult education class I have offered here has been better attended than I had ever hoped. Every time I have used a Jewish holiday as an opportunity to teach, people have flocked to the moment. We have truly become a learning congregation.

What we are not is a praying congregation. And because we are not a praying congregation, we are failing to stamp real, practical knowledge and skill that can enrich our lives. I have two proposals to address that.

First, we cannot become a praying congregation without actually praying. And the most important prayers a Jew says are those said in the morning – particularly on Shabbat morning. Last year I developed a 45 minute long Shabbat morning service that draws from every part of our liturgy while preserving its essentials. It isn't a perfect service, but it is a beginning. Starting this Shabbat, and continuing one Shabbat per month, I will be leading this service at 8:45. For those of you who are willing to accept the challenge of developing your own ability to pray, this service is intended as a primer. For those of you who miss the old ways, this service will provide us a starting point for exploring how we should continue to develop our prayer service here at Beth Israel.

My second proposal builds upon the success we have already enjoyed as a learning congregation. I propose to teach an open-ended course on Jewish prayer. We will focus on history, structure, meaning and even the practical “how-to's” of prayer. I want the course to be open-ended first because the subject is so big, but more importantly because I want your interest, your discussion and your concern to shape much of its content. In other words, in addition to learning about prayer, this course will be about learning why we pray, why we don't pray, and what we can do to overcome the obstacles that stand between us and this sacred life-skill.

Because I consider this class so important, I want to make it readily accessible to all. So I would like to teach it over the internet using one of the video conference services such as Google Hangouts. I have had great success conducting meetings and general discussions through these services and I think they will work extremely well in a class. For the technophobic among you, I will offer all the help I can; and perhaps there are members of the congregation who will volunteer their expertise to make this all work. But I want this class to be easy to attend – regardless of the whether or how hard your day had been. My hope would be to begin our class on Wednesday, October 2 from 8-9pm. But we can adjust that depending on the needs of the majority.

The monthly Saturday morning prayer service and the weekly prayer class will provide you two different opportunities to bring prayer into your life. You can participate in one or the other or both. I indeed hope that either will lead you to the same place – to the ability to sanctify those profound moments in your life.

That is my hope for each of you individually. On a practical level, my goal is to create 12-15 members of our congregation who are experts at prayer. By that I don't just mean that they know how to pray, but also that they know why they pray. I want people who have the ability to lead a service both because they know how to do it, but also because they know what they seek to get from it. If we can achieve that, then we will have built in this small shul a vibrant community that is ready to welcome any spiritual seeker who knocks on our door. We can attend to those in need not merely by having services, but by having services that are spiritually rich. Ours is a shul with a rich and giving heart. With knowledge, thoughtfulness and insight, we can give even more.

As I look back on that night in my dorm room when I uttered that first somber prayer, I realize that many things for me have not changed in thirty years. Prayer remains a challenge to me. Sometimes, when I think of the intentionality our tradition demands in our prayers, I see myself as coming so woefully short. Sometimes, when I reflect on the content of our prayers, I find myself tripped up by the words and their sentiments. And sometimes, I just don't feel like doing it.

What has changed after years of treating prayer as an obligation is that I now see its power. When I feel lost and confused, prayer has the power to help me find my way. When I feel happy or grateful, prayer has the power to sanctify that happiness by sharing it with others. When I feel overwhelmed or insignificant, prayer has the power to raise my sights to a higher plain. When I feel scared, prayer has the power to calm me. And when I don't feel anything in particular, prayer has the power to connect me to the source of ultimate meaning. This is prayer as the means of sanctifying our lives. This is prayer as a life-skill.

As we now get ready to close our prayers on this day of remembrance, I know that for many of you these hours have consumed a lot of patience. The Jewish calendar may say its Rosh Hashanah, but that does not necessarily mean you are in the mood or have the desire, let alone the skill to pray. That, of course, is part of the demand prayer makes of us: sometimes you have to do it not because you feel like it, but because it is time. If this day has been to you more obligation than spiritual journey, I ask you to consider this radical idea: I ask you to consider that this is something in your life that needs fixing. Each of our lives is a sacred undertaking. Each is touched by moments of greatness, of goodness, of joy and of pain. These moments deserve to be sanctified. These moments deserve prayer. Let us learn the ability to pray from one another. And let that learning show us the holiness in our lives.

Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Evening, Beth Israel Synagogue, 1 Tishrei 5774

This past year, inspired by news that my mentor Rabbi Hesch Sommer had actually read the thing, I went ahead and bought a copy of the 800-page behemoth of a book Heavenly Torah by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel as translated by Rabbi Gordon Tucker.  I haven't gotten very far in the book.  Actually, I've only read as far as the translator's acknowledgments.  But one statement there really caught my attention.  Rabbi Tucker writes that “much work on this translation and commentary was done over a number of summers in a very beloved setting, the ocean beach in Corolla, North Carolina.  The pristine beauty of the sky and sands and the awesome power of the ocean reminded me constantly of (Rabbi) Heschel's unique understanding of the role of radical amazement in the religious consciousness.”

As many of you know, and as I have spoken of here before, my family and I spend a couple of weeks every year vacationing on the ocean beach in Corolla, North Carolina.  Many a sermon has been planned out or even written there.   At least one has been inspired by its surroundings.  The structure of my rabbinical-school master's thesis was actually first sketched out with my toes in the sand there.   Tonight's sermon too came from that place, and it was my wife who inspired it.

We were walking along the beach together when she said to me, “This is the perfect place to spend the month of Elul.”  Elul is the Hebrew month that ended this evening and traditionally it is seen as preparatory for the high holidays.  Beginning in Elul the shofar is sounded each day to remind us that Rosh Hashanah is approaching and with it the judgment of the heavenly court.  Elul is a time of repaying debts, of fulfilling promises as yet unkept, of reflecting on our lives and where we stand with regard to our hopes and expectations. 

So when Terri said that the beach there in Corolla was the perfect place to spend the month of Elul, I knew exactly what she meant.  But the first thing that came to my mind when she said it were these words from ספר קהלת, the book of Ecclesiastes:  all the rivers flow to the sea, and yet the sea is not filled up. 

Ecclesiastes, or, to call it again by its Hebrew name Kohelet, is a strange, powerful and presciently modern book.  You all know the famous opening of its third chapter:  “To everything there is a season and I time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, etc.”  Yet the bulk of this book is a somber reflection on man’s limitedness and the folly of so many of his efforts: הֲבֵ֤ל הֲבָלִים֙ אָמַ֣ר קֹהֶ֔לֶת - “Futility of futilities, says Kohelet,” in the book’s second verse - הֲבֵ֥ל הֲבָלִ֖ים הַכֹּ֥ל הָֽבֶל: “futility of futilities, all is futile!”  That pretty much sets the tone for what follows.

Who is Kohelet?  According to the text he is בֶּן־דָּוִד מֶלֶךְ בִּירוּשָׁלָם - Son of David, King in Jerusalem.  Our tradition therefore identifies him as King Solomon.  The name Kohelet derives  from the Hebrew root that means to assemble, therefore we interpret his name to mean the one who assembled wisdom, or the one in whom wisdom was assembled - that is, King Solomon. 

And to what conclusions does Solomon or Kohelet come concerning wisdom?  Basically that wisdom is better than folly, but that neither wisdom nor folly stand as an enduring monument to ourselves.  He writes:

I saw that there was more gain in wisdom than in folly just as there is more gain in light than in darkness.  Someone who is wise has eyes in his head, while a fool goes around in darkness.  But then I also knew that there is but one fate that is fated for us all.  So I said to myself, since what will happen to the fool will also happen to me, why have I bothered gaining greater wisdom?  And then I said to myself, “this too is futility.”

Or consider, if you will, the famous words with which the book opens:

What gain is there to a man in all the struggles that he struggles under the sun?  A generation comes and a generation goes, but the earth stands forever.  And the sun rises, and the sun sets, then it pants to its place and there it rises… The wind goes round and round and then to its rounding it returns.  All rivers flow to the sea, and yet the sea is not filled up; to the place where the rivers flow, there they return to go … The eye is never satisfied with seeing,  nor is the ear filled with hearing.  That which was, is that which will be, and that which was done, is that which will be done, and there is nothing entirely new under the sun.  Sometime, there is something of which someone says “Look, this is new!”  It has already existed in the ages before us.  There is no remembrance of the earlier ones, and also, as to the later ones that will be, there will be no remembrance among those who come later still.

I need to comment here about the language.  To me, this is some of the most beautiful, most powerful poetry ever written.  Its even prettier in the Hebrew.  Listen to just one verse: מַה־שֶּֽׁהָיָה֙ ה֣וּא שֶׁיִּֽהְיֶ֔ה וּמַה־שֶּׁנַּֽעֲשָׂ֔ה ה֖וּא שֶׁיֵּֽעָשֶׂ֑ה וְאֵ֥ין כָּל־חָדָ֖שׁ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּֽׁמֶשׁ:  One might be tempted to call it pessimistic or fatalistic.  But I ask you: how can anything this beautiful be either?  The word I would use to describe it is poignant.  Its poignant because our lives are poignant.  Within us is the God-given desire to do and achieve and distinguish ourselves, hopefully for good.  Yet for all that desire, the world remains aloof and indifferent to us.  Kohelet captures that poignant struggle and addresses it not with some platitude about life’s mysteries, but with the unvarnished truth visible to our eyes: that the world keeps spinning without our pushing.

Which takes me back to the beach in Corolla.  We’ve been vacationing there as a family for 10 years now and I sometimes wonder why.   I personally take both joy and comfort in going back to places that are familiar, so that is certainly a part of it.  Then of course there is the wonderful time we have as a family which, as my children continue to grow, becomes more and more precious to me.  But there are things about Corolla and the Outer Banks that are less than ideal.   The twelve hour drive takes a lot out of you - especially on the way back.  The restaurants there are either expensive or lousy.  The sun can, at times, be brutally hot and while there is plenty of shopping, there isn’t anything to buy.  And to be honest, it can get a bit boring there some times.

But then there is that beach; that astonishing, magnificent beach. 

I have been to prettier beaches.  The beaches in St. John seem to exist at the very edge of Paradise.  But the beach at Corolla seems to exist at the very edge of the earth.  If you go there early in the morning or late in the afternoon, you can sit on that beach virtually alone.  It stretches out as far as the eye can see both north and south.  Before you, the blue-green ocean circumscribes what seems like an entire hemisphere.   When the wind blows, the waves beat down on the shore with enormous force.  One cannot help but measure oneself against them as they rise up and crash down. 

As you stare at the sand bar before you, it becomes increasingly alive with sideways slip of more and more sand crabs.  While their bodies are often camouflaged, their pairs of Picasso-like eyes give them away.  They can move with palpable caution, or dash across the sand with blinding speed.

Closer to the water, the sanderlings perform a magnificent dance.  As the waves retreat, these little birds rush in to peck for their food in the still saturated sand.  But they don’t like to get their feet wet so they are constantly pirouetting and running to avoid the next, oncoming wave.  Their movements are beautiful and, in their own tiny way, astonishing. 

For ten years now, in the rising sunshine or gathering shadows, I have sat, staring at this same, glorious scene.  Only of course, it is never the same.  The crabs are different crabs, the sanderlings are different sanderlings, even the ocean is a different ocean as the wind and tide stir up new waters every day.  A generation comes and a generation goes, but the earth stands forever.

What makes the beach at Corolla so special to me is that I feel the presence of Kohelet when I’m there.  And his presence reminds me of the poignancy of my life, and of all of our lives.  Bigger than the crabs and the sanderlings, but smaller than the crashing waves, I take my place on the beach for my time.  Today someone else was sitting out there.  And generations from now it will be yet another person.  Perhaps that person will share with others the profound feelings that place evokes in him.  Perhaps they will be astonished by the freshness of his insight.  You and I both know that there is nothing entirely new under the sun.  But you and I will be long forgotten.

Which brings me back to Terri’s insight.  “This is the perfect place to spend the month of Elul,” she said.   What makes the beach at Corolla such a wonderful place to spend Elul is that it provides a quiet setting in which to look at yourself and your life plainly and quietly.  This does not mean giving into despair or deciding that everything is futile.  It does mean stripping away the distractions and the vanities and focusing on the few things that really are essential to our lives.

The hopeful message in all this is that our tradition demands it of us.  Kohelet may have discovered that much of what we do is futile and chasing of the wind, but Judaism still insists that we account for ourselves.  There’s even a prayer in our morning service that warns us against giving into despair.  Sure, it says, you can see the world as futile, but never forget that we are the children of Abraham, the seed of Isaac and the congregation of Jacob.  In other words, the ties that give meaning to our lives are larger and longer than our eyes are used to seeing, and so we often miss them.  We are commanded to remember that when all seems futile, and to act accordingly.

Kohelet ends with these words: “The sum of the matter, when all has been considered: Fear God and keep his commandments, for that is man’s whole duty.  For God will judge every deed - even everything hidden - whether good or evil.”  Modern critics note that the purposefulness and piety of this final statement is in marked contrast to the rest of the book with its prominent theme of futility.  They conclude, therefore, that these final words were actually a later addition to make the rest of the text acceptable as part of the biblical canon. 

I disagree.  Kohelet’s advice to fear God and keep His commandments is not a contradiction to his message but the actual fulfillment of it.  If all is futile, then so is despair.  I leave the beach at Corolla convinced that I am very small and that the world is very vast.  But I leave it also with the sense of how privileged I am to be able to see it in all its vastness.  The sand crabs can’t.  The sanderlings can’t.  The crashing waves can’t.  It is I who have been given the ability to see it in perspective.  And that leaves me with the faith that I am attached to something that is beyond all I can see.

For those of you who have never been, I wish you your own version of the beach at Corolla.  I wish you a place that has the power to strip the vanities from your life and that gives you the chance to measure yourself against the vastness of God’s creation.  I wish you the understanding of how poignant your own life is, and then I wish you the faith to find true and enduring meaning in spite of it all.  May the One who fashioned the heaven and the earth and all that is therein grant this to you in His new year,  and may you thus return to Him in love and in awe.