Sermon for Yom Kippur Evening, Beth Israel Synagogue, 10 Tishrei 5777

This past spring I went for my annual physical.  After the normal pleasantries, my doctor got down to business.  He stared at his computer screen to look at my latest blood work.  Soon, a flurry of other windows were opening, including tests and letters from other doctors I happen to see.  In a few moments, he turned to me and told me I needed more tests.  And I did what I normally do when a doctor tells me he or she wants to look further: I panicked.  My doctor, who is truly a mensch, did his best to reassure me, and I did my best to look reassured.  But I really don’t handle doctors all that well.

That night, I slept fitfully for a couple of hours.  I woke up around midnight and started Googling. By 3 AM, I was a total wreck; scared, exhausted and completely unable to sleep.  That’s when I decided to pray.  In the dark I stumbled for my glasses, a bathrobe and, finally, a siddur.  I prayed slowly and deliberately, lingering over the words.  And they brought me comfort.  My mind began to settle.  In a little while, I put the prayer book down, went back to bed, and fell asleep.  A few days later, my doctor called with news that my tests had turned out okay, and mildly upbraiding me for not trusting him more.

I don’t pray ever day, but I do pray most days.  My own daily rubric of prayers takes me between 20 and 30 minutes, depending on how fast I go and whether I add prayers here and there along the way, as I often do.  I usually, but don’t always, put on my tallit to pray.  I rarely use tefillin.   But you might be surprised to know that I do use an Orthodox siddur - the Koren Siddur which is relatively new and has a clean, modern style which appeals to me.  What I like most about it is that it lays out the Hebrew, not as large blocks of text, but as the poetry it truly is. 

As someone who was raised an atheist, prayer has been a struggle for me.  It has taken me years to develop a minimal competence as a שליח צבור - a prayer leader - and even that faint praise might be too generous.  And it has taken me just as long to develop a true need to pray - a need that transcends temporary wants or anxieties and touches my very being. When I don’t pray, I feel like something is missing in my day.  But that said, my prayer is often - perhaps too often - mechanical.  I often find myself at the end of a prayer having been barely aware that I had even started it.  This, of course, is a far cry from the Talmudic standard which demands a concentration so intense that if a snake curled itself around our feet while we prayed, we wouldn’t take notice. I won’t need many hands-worth of fingers to count how many times I reached that standard of intentionality.

So let’s begin with that - with the recognition that prayer in general, and Jewish prayer in particular - is very hard to do right.

How hard?  Recently I spent a Saturday afternoon attending a Catholic Mass at which a friend’s daughter was being married.  The entire service, including the wedding, ran to about an hour and a half.  There were some hymns and a couple of scriptural readings of little more than a half dozen verses.  And, of course, there was communion.  The only thing in the service that struck me as anything close to the Jewish concept of prayer was the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

Just out of curiosity, I did a word count on that prayer.  It came, in its traditional form and including the “amen” at the end, to seventy words.  In the course of those seventy words, a Catholic manages to confess submission to God’s will, and asks for sustenance, forgiveness and deliverance.   That prayer is shorter than the first of nineteen blessings that constitute the weekday עמידה.  The עמידה includes requests for knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, redemption, healing, prosperity, justice, the ingathering of the exiles, the preservation of the righteous, the destruction of the wicked, the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the restoration of the Davidic kingdom.  And that doesn’t include the three opening blessings of praise or three closing blessings of acceptance, thanks and peace.  In all, the עמידה runs close to 800 Hebrew words, which corresponds to more than 1200 in English.  And that is but a single section of the liturgy.  I haven’t even touched the שמע or the lengthy blessings that surround it. 

For some reason, I have had much less experience with Protestant prayer than I have Catholic.  I have had no experience with Muslim prayer.  But from what I have learned about both these faith’s practices, neither has anything near the length nor the complexity of Jewish prayer. 

The point I am trying to make is that Jewish prayer isn’t merely long and hard.  The demands it places on its practitioners are far beyond what is expected in any other faith system with which I am familiar.  This might have worked in a shtetl or in a ghetto where a Jew was regularly forced into prayer environments and could absorb its language and habits through osmosis.  But once regular synagogue attendance became the exception rather than the rule, and once we raised up a generation of Jews who got their knowledge of Hebrew and prayer in a classroom rather than in a sanctuary, and then expected that generation of Jews to raise up another generation of Jews who would also get their knowledge from a classroom rather than a sanctuary, the hope that we could convey to a majority of our people the great depths of thought and subtle emotional power that our prayers command became became a distant one at best.  When we lost the ability to pray comfortably, with knowledge and ease, we also lost the understanding of why prayer is so important to us.  So let me take a few moments to tell you why prayer is so important to me.

First of all, I pray because people rely on me to do so.  My job puts me in contact with many people who are hurting physically, emotionally or both.  I pray for these people, by name, every time I pray.  And when I tell them that I do so, they are touched and grateful.  Perhaps they believe, I think mistakenly, that my prayers are more efficacious than their own.  But I think that for many of these people, that gratitude comes from the knowledge that someone - perhaps on the periphery of their own lives - is taking a moment to recall their suffering and sincerely asking that they be made whole again.  Knowing that someone else cares about your pain is, at times, medicine in itself.  I often pray just because of this - the sense that I owe these people who are suffering that moment of devotion.

Second, I pray because I feel it my due.  I do not believe that I am owed any of the thousands upon myriads of blessings that I enjoy in my life.  And heaven forbid that I feel that in praying, I am earning for myself either the continuation of those blessings or the merit of future blessings.   I pray, rather, in appreciation of feeling the need to do so.  There is, for instance, a prayer one says upon going to the bathroom.  It says, in essence, thank you God for all the parts of my body that open when they should and close when they should.  Its a prayer like that that has the power to raise at least a few of our many blessings from something we take for granted to something of which we are conscious.

Third - and this is especially true when I pray here - I pray because its fun.  I love it when I begin a service with a niggun and people actually join in.  I love that I have no idea which tune for לך דודי is going to come out of my mouth until it does.  I love that I know four different ways to sing Psalm 150, one more joyous then the next.  I love gathering up my ציצית and kissing them during the שמע.  I love singing the קדושה and ישמחו and אין כאלהינו and אדון עולם.  And when there are, in this place, enough voices to, at least in part, drown out my own, I feel like we must be making a noise that pleases God.  And that, to me, is joyous.

As someone who has struggled with prayer, I am working hard to make prayer more meaningful and more accessible to you, my fellow strugglers.   Six years ago I streamlined these high holiday services, omitting many of their repetitions on the theory that it is better to say a prayer once with feeling than four times by rote.  More recently, I have introduced a once-a-month Shabbat morning service that seeks to bring the full beauty of our most important and extensive liturgy into a brief, three-quarters of an hour.  In both of these innovations, I have tried to preserve and present the essence of Jewish prayer in a form that will make people wish to master it and think of it as their own.  Mindful of how hard it is to become someone who prays, I am doing my best to ease and broaden our paths into prayer.  In this way, I hope to make prayer a part of our lives that we rely on, that we feel is our due, and that brings us joy.

But there is yet another reason why I pray; a reason that surpasses all the others.  Indeed, it is to me the very essence of prayer.  To try and explain it, I have to take you back to that night last spring when, in exhaustion and fear, I picked up my siddur at three in the morning.  What prayers does one say at such times?  Its too late for the evening service and too early for the morning.  For some reason, I decided to pray the הלל - that collection of Psalms 113 through 118 with which we praise God on our festive days.  Our tradition attributes them to King David which would make them around 3000 years old.  But on that difficult night, it was as if they had been written just for me.  I read מִן־הַמֵּצַר קָרָאתִי יָּהּ עָנָנִי בַמֶּרְחָב יָהּ: - From the narrow place, I called to God.  He answered me from God’s wide expanse. 

Each of us inhabits a very narrow place.  It is a place bounded tightly by a short span of years, but whose walls we veil over so as not to succumb to despair.  Then something happens: the veil is lifted, the walls seem to close in on us and we are find ourselves frightened and alone.  From that very narrow space we cry out to something beyond ourselves.  We cry out to God.  We cry out with the same words that David cried out; with the same words that he gave to the scores of generations that cried out between us and him.  Those words connect us to those untold generations that came before us, and to the untold generations that will follow us, thus transcending our narrowness.  And thus does God answer us from His unlimited expanse.  And while it does not change our situation, we in our very narrowness are comforted knowing we have an answer in that which is infinite.  We have touched, and have been touched by something transcendent and eternal.

This is why I pray. This is why our prayers are such a precious inheritance. And this is why we must work so hard to reclaim that inheritance. Rebuilding this shul as a modern, vibrant and prayerful community will not be easy. Indeed, doing so will go against some of the most entrenched trends in our society. But doing so will reclaim for us – and more importantly for our children – what is perhaps the most important tool one can possess for building a good and flourishing life: the conviction that that life is not a narrow thing, but has the ability – nay the need - to touch the broadest plains. With God’s help and with your willing patience, we can do this together.

May the Holy One who revealed Himself to our ancestors, grant us the patience and the strength to recover their words of praise and thanks and petition, and make them our own.  May He make our prayers a source of comfort to those who need them, a source of reflection in our own lives, and source of joy that binds us all together as one community.  And may He, from His infinite expanses, hear our small voices, whispered from our narrow places, and answer us.

Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Morning, Beth Israel Synagogue, 1 Tishrei 5777

ברוך המקום, ברוך הוא.  ברוך שנתן תורה לאמו ישראל, ברוך הוא.
Blessed be the Omnipresent, blessed be He!  Blessed be the one who gave the Torah to His people Israel, blessed be He!

Allow me to begin with an aside.  What I am about to say has nothing to do with my sermon topic, but is, rather, an appreciation of the greatness of Torah.  The Talmudic sage Ben Bag Bag observed as the reward of continued Torah study, הֲפֹך בָּהּ, וְהַפֵּך בָּהּ דְכֹלָה בהּ - Turn it over and turn it over, because everything is in it.  The genius of holding something as an eternal gift from God is that you keeps you turning it over and it keeps you amazed by what you find in it.  I have been turning over Torah every Shabbat morning for close to 20 years, and every year I challenge myself to find something new in it.  The wonderful members of this community who join me in this study both push me to deepen my own understand of this difficult text and make the task of doing so as rewarding an experience as I have known.

Sometimes, the task of finding something new in a text you have read 20 times before means digging all the deeper into its language.  Here we Jews are blessed with thousands of years of written commentary by some of the most brilliant minds who, like us, have turned this text over and over seeking insight, understanding, and the contentment that they bring.  But sometimes, indeed more often then not, that new thing for which you are looking is hiding in plain sight - there all along, like a Pokemon - just waiting for you to see it. 

Such is the case for me with today’s Torah reading.  For as long as I have been reading this text, particularly in the context of this day, I have been focused on its first three aliyot, which tell the story of Abraham’s abandonment of his first son Ishmael.  I have always viewed this story as the counterpoint to tomorrow’s reading, Genesis 22 which tells of the binding and near sacrifice of his second son, Isaac.  Reading it thus, I have completely ignored the contents of the last two aliyot of today’s reading.  These sections deal with dispute over water rights between Abraham and the Philistine chieftain Avimelech.  Avimelech’s servants have seized a well that Abraham dug and Abraham wants the well back.  He presents Avimelech with seven lambs, whose acceptance of the gift ratifies Abraham’s claim to the well.   Hence the place becomes known as באר שבע from the Hebrew words באר meaning well and שבע meaning seven.  The well of the seven. 

This story touches on a deeper truth about the land of Canaan - the land Abraham’s descendents will inherit and land we call the modern state of Israel.  It is a dry land; a land in which water is a precious commodity.  This idea is touched on in Deuteronomy as Moses, who will never, in fact, enter the land himself, nonetheless describes it for his people.  The land, he tells them, is not like Egypt where the Nile supplies a constant source of irrigation.  Rather, the land is completely dependent on the rain that falls upon it in its season.  אֶרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יְי אֱלֹהֶיךָ דֹּרֵשׁ אֹתָהּ תָּמִיד עֵינֵי יְי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בָּהּ מֵרֵשִׁית הַשָּׁנָה וְעַד אַחֲרִית שָׁנָה: - it is a land that the Lord your God looks after continually - God’s eyes are upon it from the beginning of the year until its end.   For us, for whom it would never cross our minds to turn off the shower while we soap up, failure to appreciate the preciousness of water is an impediment to understanding Abraham’s dispute with Avimelech over possession of a well.

I drove past Beersheva last December.  The city just kind of pops up on you, situated as it is on the edge of the Negev desert.  Its home now to 200,000 people and its growing quickly.  Israel is developing it as yet another world-wide technology site, this time with an emphasis on cyber-security.  Its also sight to major facilities of the Israel Defense Forces and the home of Ben Gurion University. 

We drove past Beersheva on our way to S’de Boker, the kibbutz on which Israel’s most noted founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion lived and is buried.  S’de Boker is now the sight of Ben Gurion University’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research.  There, in one of its laboratories, we witnessed an ongoing experiment in which fish were being grown in various mixtures of fresh and highly treated wastewater.  The experiment is showing promising results and if all ultimately goes well, the plan is to use the wastewater generated by the city of Beersheva to farm fish.  Imagine that!  Farming fish in the desert, on a piece of land which is named for a fight over water rights.

Israel is an extraordinary land in so many ways.  But in its championing of water technology, it may well be creating tools that can save the world.  This from a land that, from the time of the patriarchs until just a couple of years ago, depended entirely on a good rainy season for its existence.  Our prayers reflect this basic truth.  From the end of Sukkoth to the beginning of Pesach - the rainy season in Israel - a prayer for rain is part of our daily liturgy.  The rest of the year we pray for dew - the only source of water during the summer months.  Eighty years ago, the British restricted Jewish emigration to Palestine, condemning thousands if not millions of Jews to death in Nazi concentration camps, partly on the justification that the land's water resources could support no more then two million people.  Now it is home to ten million Jews and Arabs and Israel actually exports water intensive crops like melons to the rest of the world.  When I was there ten years ago, the water level of the Kineret - the Sea of Galilee - was a part of every newscast.   Since that time, Israel has lined its Mediterranean Sea Coast with with a string of desalination plants - one of which is the largest in the world - that collectively provide the country with 785 million cubic yards of potable water per year.  The revolution was made possible by technology developed and refined in Israel to make desalination cheap.  In a part of the world where all the surrounding countries are parched, Israel actually has a surplus of water. 

And desalination is only a part of that story.  Since the founding of the state, Israel has treated water as a precious economic good that cannot be wasted.  In Israel, every drop of water - even the water that falls on  your own private roof -  belongs to the state and must be purchased by the end user at its actual cost.  This early decision by Israel’s leaders to treat water as an economic good instilled in Israelis a sense of its value.  And like all people faced with real economic choices, Israelis didn’t just conserve water, they discovered ways to make it cheaper and go farther. 

Israel created drip irrigation which is vastly more water efficient then either sprinkler or flood irrigation.  Israel has pioneered the development of seeds and fertilizers that produce more crops on less land and using fewer resources, including water.  And - at a time when many major cities are losing a third or more of their fresh water to leaks in their systems -  Israel has created a water infrastructure that can trace every drop. 

Israel’s mastery of water technology is beginning to change how the world sees this tiny country.  Most of the nations of Africa severed their ties to Israel after the Yom Kippur War of 1973.  But just this summer, Prime Minister Netanyahu was greeted warmly on a tour of four East African countries.   Each of them - and many more across that continent - want something Israel can provide better than any other nation - expertise in confronting terrorism and technology for managing water.

But perhaps the most dramatic example of how Israel’s expertise in water is changing the shape of the world and relations across the Middle East is the Red Sea-to-Dead Sea Conveyance Project.  Israel’s neighbor Jordan, with whom it concluded a peace treaty in 1994, is in desperate need of water.  But unlike Israel with its long Mediterranean coast on which to build desalination plants, Jordan’s only access to the sea is in the south, at the Gulf of Aqaba.  In the meantime, the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on earth relative to sea level, is quickly disappearing as both Israelis and Arabs have diverted water from its source - the Jordan River - into agricultural uses. 

There are two major problems the Jordanians  face in trying to build a desalination plant on the Gulf of Aqaba.  First, the gulf’s ecosystem - filled as it is with many coral reefs - is too fragile to be able to sustain the discharge of highly saline sludge which is the natural byproduct of desalination.  Second, Jordan’s population and agricultural centers, and hence the place where it needs the water, are far to the north, around the capital city of Amman.   And Amman is a 3000 foot climb from the sea.  The need to push that much water that far and that far uphill make the costs of a desalination plant prohibitive.

Enter Israel.  Israel has a growing agricultural industry in the desert and can always use more water.  So instead of pushing it all uphill, the water from Jordan’s desalination plant will be sent to Israel.  Israel in turn will compensate Jordan by allowing it to draw water from the Sea of Galilee, right near Amman.  The water will flow through the West Bank and thus increase Palestinian access to fresh water.  And that highly saline sludge from the plant?  Instead of pumping it into the Gulf of Aqaba, it gets pumped into the Dead Sea to help replenish that struggling body of water.

My visit to the Zuckerberg Water Institute was easily the highlight of my trip to Israel.  Driving back, again passing Beersheva, that city where 4000 years ago Abraham struggled to hold on to a single well of water, I needed to share my excitement.  I called my father-in-law and told him about all that I had seen and learned.  His reaction?  “What do you expect from the Israelis?”  And then he said something that really got me thinking.  He said, “the Israelis understand that human beings are the one inexhaustible resource.”

In a few moments, this service will end and we will all reassemble downstairs to see the model of our proposed renovation of this building unveiled.  As David Stein’s long range planning committee has brought us to this point, my own emotions have run the gamut from excitement to terror.  On the one hand, revitalizing this building and, more importantly, this community, is the one great goal I have set for myself.  On the other, I know that attempting a project this big, this challenging, this daunting may well threaten a community that has achieved a quiet stasis, living modestly off its small inheritance. 

Can we achieve the ambitious goals that are about to be put before you all?  My more rational brain is quite sure we cannot.   The times we live in - times where religious affiliation in general and Jewish affiliation in particular are declining - seem to be against us.

Is it that our parents and grandparents and great grandparents were more pious then we are?   I actually don’t think so.  I suspect that their willingness to make the sacrifices necessary to build a shul and a Jewish community reflected the constraints the larger community put on them as Jews.  This is what we have always done: build for ourselves that which has been denied us by others.  It is why this country is filled with Jewish hospitals and Jewish country clubs and Jewish colleges.  It is why Jews have been such technological and cultural pioneers - because they have been shut out of all the established paths into our society.  It is why the Arab boycott of the nascent State of Israel actually made the country stronger and more powerful. 

But these are no longer times when Jews feel particularly marginalized by the larger society.  They are, indeed, well wrapped up in it - including its trend toward secularization.  For that small number of Jews for whom their religion is a large part of their lives, the tendency is not necessarily to join the shul that is in their town, but to find the one whose practices and programming best meets their needs.  A committed Jew in Wallingford cannot be faulted for seeking a spiritual home in the much larger religious communities in places like Hamden or Cheshire. 

For all these reasons, then - the seamless integration of Jews into the wider culture, the growing secularism of that culture, and the freedom that religiously committed Jews have to seek out even distant communities - leaves me feeling very dubious that the plans we are about to reveal will ever become anything more then that.

But I cannot help but see in my mind’s eye the skyline of modern day Beersheva.  No doubt the desert that surrounds this oasis would look far more familiar to the man who dug its first well which, along with his seven sheep, gave it its name; a city in the middle of the desert that will soon be farming fish.   

Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Evening, 1 Tishrei 5777

A couple of years ago, I made the mistake of speaking off the cuff to the folks who attend this service. I noted that many of you who are here at this most lightly attended evening are also the one’s present ten days from now at ne’ilah, the conclusion of Yom Kippur. So I referred to you - lovingly, I should say - as the Dead-Enders. Even though the appellation was meant to be kindly, a number of you found it insulting and I felt chastened by the experience.

Not chastened enough, I’m afraid. When Rosh Hashanah rolled around again last year, I once more spoke off-the-cuff and once more evoked the Dead End moniker. The reaction was no happier the second time around.

So this year, my opening remarks are prepared. But by what name do I refer to you - my dear friends who will be with me on every step of this journey from here to the break fast? The rabbi’s loyal minions, perhaps? The gluttons for punishment? Then I remembered a passage of Talmud I studied once. It deals with the mitzvah of lighting the candles of Hanukkah. Now I know most of you have been doing this forever, but you might never-the-less be surprised by what the law on this really says.

According to the Talmud, a man fulfills his obligation to light lights on Hanukkah - and remember, lighting lights on Hanukkah is a time-bound positive commandment so only men are obliged to perform it - by lighting a single candle. But then the Talmud goes on to say that the מהדרין - that is to say, the zealous ones - light a candle for each member of their household. But then Talmud goes farther, for there are those who are even more pious in their observance. These the Talmud calls the מהדרין מן המהדרין - the zealots among the zealous. And these folks who follow the ruling of בית הלל light one candle on the first night, two on the second, three on the third and so on and so on and so on. And that my friends is all of you. No longer will you be Dead Enders to me. Rather, you are the מהדרין מן המהדרין - the zealots among the zealous. The very picture of piety.

Because you are my מהדרין מן המהדרין, I feel an urge to speak more intimately this evening then I do tomorrow morning or really at any other time outside the concluding services on Yom Kippur. So indulge me, if you will, if I share with you a small but personal observation.

The words “Love ya’” are two of the easiest words to say.

The words, “I love you” are three of the hardest.

I made this observation recently as I pondered how I was going to close an email. I don’t remember the subject of the email and I don’t remember to whom I sent it. It was probably to one of my daughters, but it might well have been to a niece or nephew. What I remember was closing the message with either “love,” or “love ya,” and knowing that was wrong. It was a throw-away line; one that implied a serious connection but did so in an unserious way. What I really meant to say was “I love you.” But at the same time, I was afraid to do so. One might be able to say “I love you” in an off-handed way, but you can’t write it that way. When you write the words “I love you,” you are saying something very serious indeed. How often do we, in our relationships with others, rise to the seriousness of what we feel? How often do we let those emotions go unexpressed, trusting that their object really knows how we feel without our saying it.

At the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, Edgar, who is perhaps the story’s greatest hero, says the following as he stands over all the corpses that have collected around him. He says “The weight of these sad times we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” I think that is good advice for the time we are in right now. The high holidays need not be a particularly sad time. But they are weighty times. The weight comes from the notion that our lives are worthy of examination and critical judgement. Speaking what we feel can be a great impetus to such examination.

Let me be clear. When I say that we should “speak what we feel,” I am talking exclusively about the good stuff; the feelings that we have that are affirming and positive. The lesson that we should confront people when they slight or injure us is one that I feel is too often given and too readily heeded. In the course of a relationship - the give and take of life - we are often apt to choose the wrong word or be oblivious to the hurt look, or just careless or ignorant of our own doings. I don’t want to suggest that these are acceptable things or that we shouldn’t try to improve our dealings with others. But I don’t think we can or should live our lives so involved in our own sensitivities or conscious of those of others that we lose our spontaneity or subvert our genuine personalities. So as to speaking what we feel when we are hurt, my advice is, confront when you must, but suck it up when you can.

But when what we feel is something affirmative, then I believe we have an obligation to speak it. These weighty times call on each of us to take a חשבון הנפש, and accounting of our souls. Too often such an accounting focuses on the failures we have amassed or the debts we have incurred. But a true accounting requires that we inventory the good as well as the bad. And I believe it is the appreciation of the good that is within us that provides the impetus to make ourselves all the better.

Sermon for Yom Kippur Morning, Beth Israel Synagogue, 10 Tishrei 5776

This past May, in an outreach effort toward the Jewish community, President Obama spoke at Adas Israel Congregation in Washington about the state of relations between the United States and Israel. At the beginning of his speech, he noted that one of the congregation's members, Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly, had once called him the first Jewish president. Mr. Obama happily assumed this as an honorary title.

I found this intriguing, so I looked up Mr. Goldberg's article to try and understand his thinking. He begins it with a funny story. Mr. Goldberg, it seems, was one of the contributors to The New American Haggadah which was published three years ago. When he gave Mr. Obama a copy of the book, the President asked, “Does this mean we can't use The Maxwell House Haggadah anymore? Mr. Goldberg refers to this as an Member of the Tribe remark.

Mr. Obama's sense of humor is not the only evidence he cites to support his contention that the President is Jewish. In his education at Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Mr. Obama was exposed to and taught by more Jewish teachers than any previous American president. In his political career, not only has he had more Jewish advisers, they have been among his closest, and they have exercised considerable influence over the President who apparently does use The Maxwell House Haggadah at the seven Passover Seders he has held in the White House. From this, Mr. Goldberg not only learns that Mr. Obama is Jewish, he learns that he is a traditional Jew; a Jew more comfortable with the known and well-trodden paths of American Judaism; the kind of Jew you would expect to find inhabiting a retirement community in Boca Raton.

Well, I don't know the types of Jews to which Mr. Goldberg was exposed as a child, but where I came from, Mr. Obama could only be taken for one thing: a goy. And therein lies the subject I want to discuss with you today; the subject of Jewish identity. What is it that makes us Jewish?

Let me begin with a word of cautious clarification. The object of this story was not Barack Obama, it was Jeffery Goldberg. The President, I believe, as a black man, feels a deep empathy for the Jews in the same way that Jews, fifty-years ago, became prominent in the Civil Rights movement. Mr. Obama makes no claims of being Jewish. He seems to have enough trouble getting certain people to believe he is a Christian. It is, rather, Jews like Mr. Goldberg who make the claim. Which leads me to wonder: what do Jews think being Jewish means anymore?

This is a very large question; one that cannot be done full justice in the course of a short – or even very long – sermon. But I believe it a vital question for us right now. On Rosh Hashanah, I asked us to dedicate ourselves to rebuilding this synagogue – a new entryway, a new sanctuary, a new social hall, new classrooms – perhaps even a mikvah. This would be an enormous and risky challenge for us. We should undertake this challenge, I suggested, to make this place vital and exciting again – a place where people want to come together to learn and pray and eat and argue and live in a rich, rewarding Jewish community. It all sounds wonderful and I am sure even the doubters among us would love to see this place crowded and thriving again. But to make that happen, you have to be able to answer the question, why be Jewish? What does being Jewish mean? What makes Jews different?

Jews used to be different because we lived differently. We spoke Yiddish, we ate kosher, we had weird holidays that involved strange rituals like throwing out our bread or building little booths for ourselves, and which seemed to creep up on us, sporadically. All of that is a shadow of what it once was. As Jews have become fully integrated into American society, we are looking more and more for universal messages from our religion – the things that make us more like everyone else. You can see this in the evolution of the idea of mitzvah. Ask virtually any Jew what a mitzvah is and he or she will tell you its a good deed. Gone is the idea of commandment which implies a particular responsibility performed as part of a relationship – a covenant.

But the covenantal relationship not only connects a Jew to God, it connects her to her community. If we are going to rebuild this synagogue and with it this Jewish community, we are going to have to become comfortable again with the idea of a Jewish covenant and the particularism that implies. In other words, we are going to have to get used to the idea that Jews are – in important ways – different from everyone else. To me, this is not a theoretical proposition, it is a simple fact. In trying to understand this fact for myself, my thoughts have focused on three ways in which Jewish identity is inevitably different from that of our neighbors. First, we live in a different place from everyone else. Second, we live with a different sense of time and personal identity than everyone else. And finally, these profound differences in our understanding of place and time impress upon us an equally profound sense of purpose that is different from everyone else. Let me try to explain.

When I say that we live in a different place from other people, of course I mean this metaphorically. What I mean to say is that Jews constantly have before us both a vision of the real world in which we live and an ideal world which we need to build. The place we live in is somewhere in the middle, and we are constantly negotiating between the two, never quite sure in which we want to be.

This strange limbo comes directly from our relationship with Torah. To us, Torah is sacred – the unchangeable, immutable word of God. To question the sanctity of a single letter – let alone a word or phrase or commandment – is absolutely forbidden. Yet as my friend Ken Burt, one of my most devoted study partners and himself a Catholic is constantly asking me, “Is this really where you want to be?” Let me illustrate his point. Torah prescribes the death penalty for something like two dozen different offenses including blasphemy, sabbath breaking and cursing a parent. Yet when we actually look at how Jewish law is carried out, we discover that the death penalty is virtually never imposed. Our tradition teaches that a rabbinic court that passed down a single death sentence every 70 years was considered blood-thirsty. Caught between the Torah's demands and the real world in which we live, we have sided with the real world – all the while insisting that in doing so, we are honoring the Torah's sanctity. And this is but one example of the thousands of interpretive liberties that Jews have taken with the Torah – all done in the name of being true to its message. So convinced are we that kol n'teevotekhah shalom – all of its ways are ways of peace – that we will not rest until they have found the decency and humanity in even the most challenging of its pronouncements.

This ability to, on the one hand declare something immutable and unchangeable and, on the other, to change it, may sound like madness. It is, in fact, our peculiar genius. It has cultivated within us the attributes that have made Jews so successful in so many endeavors. On the one hand, it has developed our skills of deep analysis and creative thinking as we try to negotiate between the worlds that surround us. On the other hand, it has ingrained in us an incessant dissatisfaction with our choices which is the essential spur to achievement. Is it any wonder, then, that Jews have so greatly succeeded in virtually every academic and artistic field? And is it any wonder that Jews have practically defined American humor – infecting it with the strong sense of irony and neurosis that are themselves the byproducts of feeling oneself forever caught in the middle?

This strange sense of place that I believe is the essential element that makes Jews different, is enhanced by another sense that is equally weird: our sense of identity. The old joke that seeks to summarize every Jewish holiday in three simple sentences captures the essence of this weirdness: They tried to kill us. We won. Let's eat. The weirdness comes from the pronouns: us and we. Jews have a peculiar ability to see the world not in terms of “I” and “mine” but of “we” and ours.” This is not due to some inherent generosity that makes Jews more selfless then other people. Far from it. Jews can be as avaricious as anyone. It comes, rather, from the way our tradition demands that we see ourselves. Think about all the einus and ahnus in our prayers as in ahnu amechah or eloheinu v'eilohey avoteinu. Each one of those is a we or an our. Even on this Day of Atonement, our lengthy confessions of sin are all in the first person plural.

But the truly cool thing about this collective identity of ours is that it travels through time. We learn in both The Maxwell House and The New American Haggadah that every Jew needs to see him or herself as coming out of Egyptian slavery. We were there when we were led out of slavery, and we were there when we were marched into captivity. We were there with the Maccabees, and we were there on Masada. We were expelled from Spain in 1492, and emancipated in France in 1791. We were on the boats that landed in this country at the turn of the last century, and on those that were turned away 40 years later. We were dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv in 1947, and were crying at the Wall in 1967. The way we pray, the way we talk about history, the way we think about ourselves as part of the covenant all evokes a single message: that each of our lives compasses all of Jewish history. And that is the real point here: because all of Jewish history takes in not only the past, but the future as well. This peculiar sense of Jewish identity teaches us that the past is ours to draw on as we shape the future that is in our hands.

These two great differences – our altered sense of place and time – leave a deep impression on us, leading to yet a third difference – the belief that being Jewish really matters to who we are. Down through history, many Jews have decided they do not want to be different and therefore have left Judaism, one way or another. But those that remain – whether they embrace their Judaism or are hostile to it – do so because they are, in some ways, marked by their faith. I remember when I was in college talking to a casual acquaintance with whom I had no religious connection when one of us dropped a coin. “That sounds like a dime,” he said. “How can you tell,” I asked, a bit incredulous. He shook his head at me and gave me a wry smile. “I'm Jewish,” he replied, thus embracing a dubious stereotype as part of his identity.

To be a Jew in this country is to be one person in 50. To be a Jew in this world is to be one in 50,000. For those who do not consciously cast their faith away, the sheer improbability is often enough to give us pause. So long as being Jewish means being different and so long as that difference retains the vitality it had for their ancestors, they will see their being Jewish as something meaningful. And if their Judaism is meaningful, then their lives must be meaningful as well. Finding meaning is the greatest quest each of us.

My concern with defining how Jews are different, may strike some of you as exclusionary. If it does, I urge you to come to Torah study one Shabbat morning. Around our large table you will find quite as many Christians as Jews, studying together and learning from each other. The Christians are not there because they want to convert. Far from it. They are there because they find that that atmosphere – where we all struggle to find the sanctity in what are often very difficult texts, and where the voices of thousands of years of Jewish thinkers echo in our very modern ears – is something unique and precious; something they cannot find in their own churches, but something that adds sanctity to their lives. In other words, we become closer to our neighbors not by hiding our differences, but by sharing them.

I was raised an atheist in a thoroughly Jewish home – a home filled with Yiddishkeit. The Yiddishkeit alone, though, was enough to convey to me those things that make Jews different. The concern for the health of our society which was a constant subject in our home, and the deep sense of irony though which all my elders seemed to look at the world, taught me to measure what there is against what there might be. Concern for the plight of Russian Jews and the safety of the State of Israel turned my attention from “me” to “we.” And the prevalence of playground antisemitism made me believe I was a Jew for a reason. When it came time to make my own home, to raise my own family, I knew the Yiddishkeit I could bring to it would inevitably be a lower cholesterol version. It would not be enough to convey to my children that which makes us different – that which makes us Jewish. And so I found myself turning to Torah. Etz hayyim he lamah khazikim bah – it is a tree of life to those who grasp it. What I learned in grasping Torah was not a substitute for Yiddishkeit – for the Jewishness of my youth. It is Yiddishkeit, Jewishness, itself. It is the thing that defines us, it is the thing that can sustain us. It is the thing around which we need to rebuild.

I want to rebuild this place, I want to make it new again, I want to see it grow again because I want every Jew that enters its doors to want to be – and love being – distinctly Jewish. I want us together to delight in this beautiful, complex and weird world of ours that demands our imagination to understand it, our sense of irony to cope with it, and our passion to make it better. I want us to feel the weight of our history – a powerful history that has known humankind's greatest heights and deepest depths. I want us to engage meaningful in our own times, driven by the sense of a bond that links every individual Jew into a “we” and an “us” and an “our.” And I want us to shape the future together, confident that we will, somehow, be present for every moment of it, as we have, somehow, been present in every moment up to now. In doing so, we will teach and reteach to each other the profound truth that every one of our lives not only matters, but is of infinite importance.

As to Barack Obama, perhaps in his post-Presidential years he will choose to make his honorary Jewishness official. To which I can only say that I would be honored to help him prepare for his conversion. He already seems to have the humor down. I suspect that, along with the aleph-bet, and with him being a politician, it is the “we” versus “me” part that will need the most work. But then he can take a dunk in our new mikvah and become someone different.

Sermon for Yom Kippur Evening, Beth Israel Synagogue, 10 Tishrei 5776

One of my teachers from rabbinical school died this past June. Rabbi Bernard Zlotowitz was an admired and beloved and figure at the Academy for Jewish Religion when I was a student there. But I am also tempted to call him an iconic figure and in doing so, I am aware that I am treading on what is, in Judaism, forbidden ground. I want to spend a few minutes tonight talking to you about this special man from whom I was privileged to learn and whose death taught me yet one more important lesson about how we live.

If I am tempted to call Rabbi Zlotowitz admired, beloved and iconic, let me begin by distinguishing among those qualities. Rabbi Zlotowitz was admired for the depth and breadth of his academic achievement and his experience as a rabbi. I am almost tempted to call him rabbis, because he actually held ordination both as an Orthodox and as a Reform rabbi. The Orthodox ordination reflected his family heritage; indeed his brother is one of the world's leading publishers of Orthodox books. But the Reform ordination reflected his true disposition – someone who combined a deep, abiding faith in God with a love of critical scholarship. He earned a Master's degree from Columbia University, and a doctorate from Hebrew Union College. He had broad experience both as pulpit rabbi and hospital chaplain and as a leader in the Reform Movement. Each of his many students cherished the stories he would tell us and the wisdom he would share with us from so broad and varied a career.

But if Rabbi Zlotowitz was admired for his achievement, he was beloved for his kindness, his humility and his simple faith. Two stories will illustrate this point. I was taking his class in biblical historiography my first winter at AJR. For some time, an ice storm was crusting over everything with an increasingly thick and slick coating. The administration decided to cancel afternoon classes right in the middle of Rabbi Zlotowitz's class. The students were terribly nervous about how we would get home, and for many of us that worry took in our 80-year-old teacher who walked slowly and with a cane. “Do not worry,” he reassured us in that beautiful, aristocratic voice of his. “God takes care of those who are engaged in His holy work.” It was such a simple and sincere confession of faith from a man whom I had already grown to respect for his knowledge and wisdom that it gave me pause. From his example I drew the lesson that one of the most important things a rabbi does is model faith and give his congregants permission to believe.

The other story touches – however lightly – on all of you. It was a little more than a year ago and I had gone to visit Rabbi Zlotowitz for a project I was working on for my school. By this time he had grown very old indeed. I arrived at his apartment around eleven in the morning, but he was still in bed. His wife of more than sixty years roused him and he greeted me in his bathrobe. He wasn't wearing his glasses and he had a dazed and perplexed look on his face. I wondered how awake and aware he was. But he asked me about my rabbinate and I told him that I had a congregation in Wallingford Connecticut that was very small but which I loved very much. Without a moment of hesitation he responded zeh ha-katan, gadol y'heyeh. Would that I, almost forty years his junior and supposedly in full possession of my faculties were ever that sharp, for it took me several moments to place his words. They were from the ceremony of brit milah – of ritual circumcision: this one is small, but some day he will be great. May that blessing come true speedily and in our days.

But if Rabbi Zlotowitz was admired for his many achievements and beloved for his kindness and humility, there was also much in him that made him iconic. Rabbinical students of all people are very susceptible to idolatry. They are surrounded by great minds and great hearts to which they seek attachment. If you close your eyes and try to conjure up the picture of a beloved teacher, the image you will form will bear a striking resemblance to Rabbi Zlotowitz during my student days. He was a small man who often wore a light colored suit with a tastefully contrasting sweater-vest, a neatly starched shirt and a perfectly knotted bow tie. Clean shaven among so many bearded teachers and students, bare headed among all those kippah covered crowns, Rabbi Zlotowitz stood out as model of the Reform rabbi of an older generation. And then there was the voice – slow, aristocratic - “Mr. Alpert,” he would greet me, “how are things in Connec -ti- cut?” Now couple that bearing with his extraordinary resume and his extraordinary kindness, and you have a figure that I think can honestly be called iconic.

For most of us, greatness seems to pass our way only rarely: the star athlete, the adored celebrity, the rising politician, the noted author, perhaps they brush into our lives once in a blue moon. My wife once was in the same swimming pool with the actress Julianne Moore. My father, as a boy, once sold a newspaper to Thomas Dewey who famously lost the presidency to Harry Truman. And I once played a round of golf with the Yankee pitcher Andy Pettitte. When such moments come, we try, hopefully discretely, to find some kind of connection between ourselves and that greatness. So it was with Rabbi Zlotowitz. So many of my fellow students crowded around him admiringly. So many sought and indeed achieved close relationships with him for the joy of being in his presence and the pride of telling others that they were his student. They would speak of their relationship with him as a point of distinction and merit in their own lives and careers.

I have to admit that I felt a certain envy toward these students and their special relationships with this great man. But I felt like I had arrived too late at the party. Rabbi Zlotowitz was well surrounded by disciples by the time I took my first class with him. There was no room for another. And while I did share a pride in being taught by him and having him know my name, I never confused that acquaintanceship with true intimacy.

There was, however, one student with whom Rabbi Zlotowitz shared a special closeness. Peg Kershenbaum was a few years ahead of me in school. In fact, Peg was the first AJR student I would meet. I met her in the cafeteria just before I climbed the stairs for my admissions interview. She told me she was there over the summer because she was working on a project with one of her teachers. In time I learned more details about that project.

What she was working on was a dictionary that she was writing with Rabbi Zlotowitz. It was to be a dictionary of the Septuagint which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. The name Septuagint – which means 70 – comes from the legend that seventy rabbis worked independently on a translation of the Torah from Hebrew to Greek and miraculously each came up with an identical work, word-for-word. The dictionary was to be in English, Hebrew and Greek. It was a mammoth undertaking, one on which Peg and Rabbi Zlotowitz labored throughout her rabbinic studies and beyond. During that visit I paid to Rabbi Zlotowitz a year or so ago, I learned that he and Peg were still working on it – now more than a decade on.

About a month after Rabbi Zlotowitz died, Peg and I were chatting about this-and-that when she commented, quite matter-of-factly, that she had no idea what she was going to do with the dictionary. She didn't have the heart to throw it out, she said, but as it ran to thousands of pages, it was taking up quite a bit of space in her house. I was dumbfounded. I had been hearing about this dictionary for so long, it had achieved epic standing in my imagination and here she was thinking of actually throwing it away? How could she?

She explained that all those thousands of pages were hand written, and that she had neither the time nor the inclination to type up and organize and edit them into a workable form. To the suggestion that someone else finish the work she thought it both highly unlikely and unmanageable; the insights contained in it could only be gleaned by someone whose approach and understanding encompassed that of Rabbi Zlotowitz and there was no one to do that. Besides, who would want such a dictionary anyway. She spoke all this as if she were telling me about today's weather – casually, easily, without a hint of regret or wistfulness.

“But the work!,” I went on, still incredulous. “What did you do it all for?” I asked.

“I did it,” she said, in that same, even, matter-of-fact tone, “to keep him alive. It gave him something to occupy his mind, something to live for.”

Think about that for a moment. All those years. All those hours. All those thousands upon thousands of pages of work done for no other reason then love.

Peg was so calm as she explained it all, I felt I needed to hide my own emotions. But I was floored. For so long I had thought what a great and wonderful man Rabbi Zlotowitz was and how privileged were all those who were close to him. Never once did it occur to me that this classmate of mine was such a great and wonderful soul in her own right and how privileged I was to be close to her.

It is easy, I believe, to seek greatness off in the distance; to believe that wealth or fame or some unique skill conveys others to some realm that we can only touch with our admiration. This, of course, is idolatry, and it is a grave sin. It is a grave sin because it confounds our ability to distinguish between excellence and transcendence – between that which may be the finest within the human realm, but which never does, and never can, cross the threshold of the divine. And it is a grave sin because it blinds us to the greatness and the goodness that is lived by those who surround us, and which is always within our grasp if we dare allow our love and our commitment and our courage to move us that far.

From having spent five hours with him, I can tell you that off of the pitching mound, Andy Pettitte struck me as a humble, unassuming and pretty ordinary guy, dealing with the same struggles that all of us face – how to best care for our loved ones, how to honor the blessings that sustain us. Under what is still a tall and hard body, there may well be a great soul; and if so, it is the same kind of greatness that inhabits the souls of so many in this room tonight. I look around and I am in awe of so many of you for your kindness, for your wisdom, for your willingness to sacrifice for others with no expectation of reward or even acknowledgment. I feel in my heart the words of our father Jacob – mah norah ha-makom ha-zeh – how awesome is this place – achein yesh Adonai ba-makom ha-zeh v'anochi lo yadati – surely God is in this place and I did not know.

Rabbi Zlotowitz used to tell jokes during class. Here is one of my favorites. A fund raiser for the local Jewish Federation comes to the wealthy business owner, Mr. Goldstein, seeking a donation. Goldstein is incensed. “What on earth made you think I was Jewish!” he thunders at the fund raiser. “I am an Episcopalian,” he says. “I come from a long line of Episcopalians! My father is an Episcopalian! My grandfather, alav ha-shalom was Episcopalian . . .”

For Rabbi Bernard Zlotowitz, alav ha-shalom, I hope my words tonight do honor to the great blessing it was to be your student. For my friend, Rabbi Peg Kershenbaum, how exalted is our Lord that He would send one great soul to love and sustain and care for another. For the great and good souls who sustain me here in this congregation, know that you are all in my prayers for a g'mar khatimah tovah – a sealing for goodness in this new year, for my sake as well as yours. And for the rest of us, may the cleansing we seek on this most holy of days open our eyes to the goodness, the greatness, the blessing that is right there before us.

Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Morning, Beth Israel Synagogue, 1 Tishrei 5776

This building, as it stands today, in 1969, represents the efforts of a legion of selfless people dating back to the beginnings of the Wallingford Jewish Community.

How many of you recognize those words? They are displayed prominently in the foyer of this synagogue. I have been been staring at these words and contemplating their meaning for some time now. This building, as it stands today, in 1969. The plastic plaque, dyed to look like wood, just as much as the words themselves, is an anachronism. So too is so much else in this shul: the porcelain water fountain; the metal railing around rabbi's lectern; the paneling in the social hall; the books in our library.

What really gets me are all the signs. For some time, my favorite was the one that read “Cloak Room.” As I was only six, my memories of 1969 are not very clear, so others will have to remind me: did men back then wear cloaks over their sansabelt slacks? Did women wear cloaks over their mini-skirts?

My fascination with the cloak room, though, gave way as I tried to decipher the meaning of the kitchen doors. The two doors to our kitchen display four signs in total, and figuring out the particular meaning of each has proved a task requiring all the textual skills I developed studying Talmud. Each door is topped with a sign that says Kitchen. These I have concluded are for identification purposes. The door on the left also has a sign that says “Kitchen, Donated by the Sisterhood of Beth Israel.” Since this door already has a sign that identifies it as being the kitchen, I have decided that the word “Kitchen” on this sign is to indicate what precisely the Sisterhood has donated. The difficulty comes when you get to the second sign on the door on the right. This one says merely “Donated by the Sisterhood of Beth Israel.” To what could this possibly be referring? At first I thought it might be the kitchen, but surely this cannot be for the other door already has a sign to tell us that the kitchen was donated by the Sisterhood of Beth Israel. Then I thought, well maybe its the door. But since there is already a sign on it that says Kitchen, thus making it a part of the Kitchen, and since I already know that the Kitchen was donated by the Sisterhood, this cannot be the case either. The conclusion I drew is that the sign that says “Donated by the Sisterhood of Beth Israel,” refers to the sign itself.

This building, as it stand today, in 1969 . . .

When I first got here eight years ago, the building made only a modest impression on me. I was forty-four-year-old, and a third year rabbinic student. I felt very lucky to have this job. I was more interested in proving myself competent to you then critiquing the facilities. In the years that followed, an amazing thing happened. I fell in love with this place and the people in it. You have all always treated me with such kindness and patience. You have always acted toward me is if I were doing you a favor by being here, when in fact, it is quite the other way round.

It is hard, when a place becomes so warm, welcoming and beloved in your mind to look at it with fresh eyes. Fond memories are like beautiful garments that highlight our best features while hiding our flaws. And yet the lifeblood of any community is its ability to bring new people into its fold. And when someone walks into this place for the first time and sees it galeh b'ervatah, we might say – uncovered in its nakedness, unadorned by the memory's finery – what do they see?

This building, as it stands today, in 1969, represents the efforts of a legion of selfless people dating back to the beginnings of the Wallingford Jewish Community. For the people who dedicated that plaque on the occasion of their rebuilding of this synagogue, there is an unspoken pride in that declaration. It recognizes a history of generosity and commitment that was their inheritance, and proclaims that the work that they have done to renew and reinvigorate this place was worthy of what they were given. So now ask yourselves this. Imagine we were given the charge of dedicated our own plaque for the lobby. It will begin with these words:

This building, as it stands today, in 2015, represents . . .

How will we complete that sentiment?

Last year, on this very day, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, this congregation delivered to me a wake-up call. My sermon topic was a very personal statement of how I came to love Israel. I hoped such a statement would kindle in all of you a passion for the beleaguered Jewish homeland. When we adjourned to our social hall for our lunch & learn, I discovered that your passions were indeed inflamed – but not over Israel. You were incensed, and understandably so, about this town's callousness in scheduling its Celebrate Wallingford festival on Yom Kippur. It was as though you were saying to me, “Wake up, Rabbi. We live here, not there.”

So shaken was I by your message that I tossed my planned Yom Kippur sermon and wrote a new one. Forget about getting the recognition you seek from this town, I told you. We are a small minority here and we are afforded tolerance and nothing more. We should not look for more, nor should we feel ourselves victimized by not getting more. Instead, we should tend to our own house. And our own house is in need of repair. We need to build it anew.

Many of you thought I was speaking metaphorically. Certainly that's what David Stein, our resident architect thought when I approached him a few days later. “Well,” I asked him, “are you ready to rebuild this place?” “I always wanted to design a synagogue,” he replied.

In the past few months, I have been meeting with a small group of board members and others in our congregation to help me flesh out this idea. That group includes Alida Cella, our president and her husband David whom you all know is a builder; David Stein, of course, and my cousin Jay Alpert who is also an architect and is currently overseeing the rebuild of the Woodmont Synagogue. And Dick Caplan and Bob Gross, both long time members and leaders of this community whose wise counsel and thoughtful actions have kept both this building and this community standing through some difficult times. Most of them came to our first meeting out of respect for me and a willingness to indulge my fantasies for an hour. But as we walked around this place, imaginations opened up, and dreams became wonderful possibilities. Climbing a rickety ladder, Dick peered up into the crawl space and reported that our cracked, stained sanctuary ceiling conceals a vaulted roof supported by beautiful truss-work. Peeking through the shuttered blinds, David imagined opening up our social hall to our new lot – bringing in air and light and creating a gathering place that connects inside and outside. Walking across that lawn Alida pointed out to me where the entryway to our new mikvah should go. All agree that a new entrance to the building – one that welcomes people in with light and color and beauty and warmth is an absolute must. I know in my imagination, this space we are now in combines the new with the old: our beautiful stained-glass windows shed light on the rich colors of our new carpet and upholstery; a magnificent ark soars all the way to the vaulted ceiling, chairs circle a central lectern big enough for Nancy and me to share and not dozens but hundreds of congregants raise their voices to beg zochreinu l'chayim – remember us for life.

So take a moment. Look around with your own eyes. Imagine this synagogue as if it were new again. Imagine it beautiful again. Imagine it vital again. Most importantly, imagine it filled with people all the time; people who want to call this place their own because they built it and its beautiful and its filled with singing and learning and praying, and eating and arguing, and laughing and caring about one another in good times and in bad. Imagine it – not as the inheritance passed down to you, but as the legacy you are building for the next generation. Can we – a small and struggling group actually make this happen? We are no poorer in resources or spirit then those who built these walls originally. We need only the vision and the will to do it.

So what is that vision? And what is that will? The will is our collective commitment and hard work. This project will require the active participation of every member of this community. We are going to need a building committee, a decorating committee, a fund raising committee. We are going to need a committee to document and preserve the history of this place so that everything that makes it precious and meaningful to so many remains an integral part of it. We are going to need schleppers and sorters and even a few critics. We are going to need people to ease the pain and trial of the loss and dislocation a project like this inevitably entails. And we are going to need people to step in and do jobs that we won't even know need to be done until we start doing them. This is the will that we require in order to make such a project a reality. It is your will, for only you can make this happen.

The vision, however, is something entirely different. And here I need to be frank with you about the costs. Thanks to the hard work and commitment of this synagogue's lay leadership, Beth Israel has achieved a measure of economic stability. Not a lot of money is coming in, but it doesn't take much to run the place. You are looking at your biggest expense, and frankly, I work cheap. To engage in a project of rebuilding would be to put that stability in jeopardy. If our efforts fail – it we add to our expenses without growing our membership – this place will not survive. The course I am encouraging for this shul can be summed up in five words: Go big, or go home.

So let me speak with you very personally. I mentioned already my falling in love with this place and its people. That was not the intention. When I first came here, I did so as an employee. I had a contract with minimal but defined responsibilities. I had hopes of staying on for at least a couple of years to fulfill my requirements for a student pulpit. But that was it. I didn't come here looking for a spiritual home.

That all began to change when I started teaching Torah here; first once a month, then, tentatively, more frequently. And you came out and supported me – at times in large numbers. As we learned more Torah together, our spiritual needs began to grow – yours for more learning, mine to make a bigger difference. There have been days this past year when I have had our children and their parents in this sanctuary for Shabbat services, while my good friend Rabbi Hesch Sommer – who volunteers his time here out of love and friendship for me – has led a crowd in Torah study in our social hall. Fifty people being led by two rabbis in this tiny little shul, and I have thought to myself al ha-nisim sheh-asitah – Oh, for the miracles that You have done!

I did not come to this place looking for a spiritual home, but for me, the miracle of Beth Israel Synagogue is that I found one anyway. I want to see this miracle grow and I believe in my heart we can do it. I have already seen it happen here time and time again and I have seen it happen in my own life. My own spiritual journey from my father's atheism to the rabbinate has taught me how hard can be the struggle with what we believe and how we should behave. Many people refer to converts to Judaism as Jews by Choice. I think in this day and age – when the price of disbelief is so low, and the cost of belief so high – every Jew is a Jew by Choice. But there are so many Jews out there – and perhaps even a few in here – who are looking for permission to make that choice. Every Jew who finds her way to a synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, or peaks furtively around a sanctuary at a nephew's Bar Mitzvah, or just pauses when she passes a shul long enough to wonder what its all about – in every one of those Jews, the ember of belief is still flickering, longing for the air that will make it flame up anew. My vision of this synagogue is of a place that fans the flame of meaning and purpose and community and caring and love and insight in people's lives. Such a life affirming vision must itself be affirmed by the space it inhabits. It can be modest or bold, traditional or modern, outgoing or reflective, but it must be vital. It cannot be a living relic to the aspirations of a generation now gone. It must be alive with the needs and dreams of those who love walking in here. We can make this happen. We have to make it happen.

So here is my suggestion for our own plaque in our welcoming, beautiful new shul:

This building, as it stands today, in 5778, represents the commitment of a new generation of Jews to honor the inheritance passed onto us by our ancestors by keeping it fresh and vital. As we say of them today, so may it be said of us a Jubilee hence: they left us something worthy of making new again.

Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Evening, Beth Israel Synagogue, 1 Tishrei 5776

Recently my teacher and dear friend Vicki Hoffer shared with me the following observation. “Judaism,” she said, “is the closest thing to atheism.”

If I pursued the thought with her, I confess to not remembering the details. The comment, though, has stayed with me. You see, I was raised an atheist. I remember as a small boy, my father answering our kitchen phone one evening. We could tell from the long pauses followed by the clipped, one word responses that he was answering a survey. One of those answers he gave was “atheist.” It didn't take much imagination to guess the question.

My father lived with cancer for three years. Terminal illness did not change his take on religion, and he lived out his final days with the same gentleness and humor and philosophical good will he showed all his life. In the years after his death, as I found religion myself and ultimately wound up a rabbi, I have felt at some pains to understand this teshuvah – this returning of mine – not as a rejection of my father's atheism, but as an affirmation of myself as his son. Such an affirmation gets at the heart of the question of what it means to be a Jew – a question that I have been pondering for some time now, and one I will address tangentially tomorrow, but in greater detail on Yom Kippur.

Hence, when Vicki suggested that Judaism was the closest thing to atheism, I was more than ready to agree. But what does this actually mean?

In my understanding, Judaism is astonishingly based on reason rather than faith. Pretty much everything in the Torah – the plagues, the parting of the sea, the revelation at Sinai, the manna and all the miracles – can all be understood equally profitably as interpretation or as metaphor. Indeed, 800 years ago Maimonides went so far as to insist that if something in the Torah appears to conflict with what we know of natural law, the Torah has to be reinterpreted as metaphor. To my way of thinking, Judaism requires us to make but one real leap of faith: it requires that we believe that somewhere – on the other side of the Big Bang – stands God putting this all in motion; and that somehow He communicated this truth to all of us. This is, to me, Judaism's one great claim on our powers of belief. And if it is a claim that cannot be supported by reason, it is, nevertheless, the claim that furnishes the reason to our dearest hopes and darkest pains. Let me try and explain.

Judaism's minimizing of the role of faith comes at a steep price. While the notion of Olam Ha-Bah – the world to come, in which all the righteous will have a share – is an important part of Judaism, its actual nature and meaning is not a matter of religious doctrine but rabbinic speculation. To put it quite simply, our Christian neighbors have a more definite idea of what awaits them beyond the grave then we do. This uncertainty, together with Judaism's natural emphasis on this life, leaves the idea of salvation beyond the grave very much an open question for us, and one which good and faithful Jews can answer quite differently.

Judaism's uncertainty about life after death has led to the canonization of two remarkable books. Koheleth, better known as the Book of Ecclesiastes, is in essence an extended exhortation to enjoy the sensual pleasures that life has to offer, because what lies beyond those pleasures is both unknowable and, perhaps, futility itself. And the Book of Job is one innocent man's pained lament that God is under no obligation to treat human beings according to their just deserts.

And that brings me to the message I wanted to share with you this evening as we begin our High Holiday odyssey together. There has been much pain in our congregation of late. Kathy Schacht's tragic loss of her sister Mary Beth a couple of weeks ago was mirrored just just weeks earlier when our prayer leader, our cantor Nancy Huber lost her sister Sherry. This morning, almost unbelievably, I found myself attending the funeral of the sister of another dear friend who also died suddenly. Often times such tragedies strike at moments when a person is most vulnerable – when life is already presenting them with challenges enough. As I have done my inadequate best to help these friends of mine in this terrible moments, my mind has drifted back repeatedly to a single line in the Book of Job. Three messengers come to tell Job of a series of horrible disasters that have carried off all of his wealth. Then a fourth messenger comes to bring him news of the deaths of all his children. The arrival of each subsequent messenger is announced with the same words: zeh m'daber v'zeh bah vayomar – this one was still talking when this one came and said . . .

Our worst nightmares conjured up in five words: zeh m'daber v'zeh bah vayomar - this one was still busy upending my world, when this one came and made it all so much worse. Personal tragedy is always a challenge to our faith in a benign and benevolent God. But tragedy upon tragedy is a challenge to our faith in justice, mercy and ultimately, meaning. The Book of Job and, in its own way The Book of Ecclesiastes, force us to face these challenges. That Judaism has chosen to canonize these books – that it has taken such honest confrontations with the greatest challenges to faith and declared them holy – is testimony to my friend's assertion that Judaism is the closest thing to atheism. And it has immeasurably deepened my faith in my religion and my God.

Since my younger daughter went off to college, an odd thing has happened in my life. The alarm rings in the morning, I make Terri her breakfast and she sets off for work. And I am left alone. Everything in my life that I hold dearer then life itself is beyond my reach. I walk into my office. I pull on my tallis, and I pray. I pray because as a father and husband, that gnaw of anxiety for my wife and children never leaves me. I pray because as a rabbi, I have promised my prayers to a lot of people who are in pain, and I have seen what comfort they gain from knowing someone cares enough to think about them every day. I pray because as a man, I am conscious of the many blessings in my life and I need to acknowledge them. But mostly, I pray because, as a Jew, I am obligated to do so. It is that sense of mitzvah – that sense of commandment – that fills my life with a sense that behind it lies a purpose and meaning that goes beyond my own pleasure and my own pain.

Zeh m'daber v'zeh bah vayomar – after all the messengers had come and had their say, after God further tested Job by inflicting him with boils from head-to-foot and reducing him to scraping at his sores with a shard of pottery – Job's wife comes to him and tells him to curse God and die already. Job is incredulous: gam et ha-tov n'kabeyl mai-ait ha-elohim, v'et ha-rah lo n'kabeyl he asks. Can we receive only the good from God and not receive the bad? I hear in Job's words something far deeper then the simple message that we have to take the bad with the good. To me, he is saying that without God, there is no bad or good and this pain that I feel, this grief that I suffer is meaningless. God in His absolutely unfathomable Will, can take everything from me. But so long as I still have Him, I still have meaning. In that moment of ultimate pain, such a message may seem of small comfort. In the constant uncertainty that surrounds my life, and all of our lives, I am trying to live as though that were the greatest comfort there can be.