GTTP Samples

GTTP Samples

| Back to Front Page | Back to Non-subscribers' Front Page |

| What Others Say About Us | How to Subscribe |

A Sample of GTTP Technology

The are a few of the Rosh Hashanah "Get-to-the-Points" for sermons.

Some easy-to-find ideas on which to build your own original sermon.
(Not the complete list - by far!)

Please note: The Brown Links go to the specific sermon.

The Blue Links go to the specific "Point" inside the sermon.

These are examples of how fast you can find interesting ideas and then see how they were developed in the original sermon.

Please note that Rosh Hashanah sermons on this page are specifically related to Rosh Hashanah concepts--personal introspection, forgiveness, teshuvah, etc.

If you try to print this page, be aware that is is about 80 regular pages!!

Get-to-the-Point

Ideas for Rosh Hashanah

Click on the name of the author to take you to the beginning the the full sermon.

Click on beginning of each idea you like to take you to the complete sermon.

Charles P. Sherman, Sound the Horn

We are supposed to build our lives on good values, and by the way we live prepare ourselves for the unforeseen, the unexpected.

Judaism tells us to raise the standards of personal behavior and accountability and of the level of our compassion and decency as a community.

Today the so-called underclass defines what the rest of us are supposed to copy.

Mere lip service to higher ideals will not get us anywhere.

Our Jewish tradition provides ways to correct sins, missed marks, but not just by uttering "I am sorry;"

Harold M. Schulweis, Conversation with the Angel of Death

There are times when religion is a matter of life and death.

I can will my smile--I cannot will my happiness. I can will my eating, I cannot will my hunger. I can will going to sleep, I cannot will my dreams. I can will knowledge, I cannot will wisdom.

Judaism celebrates freedom of will. It has from the time of the Bible on struggled against pre-destination theologies, against fate.

Every event has a reason for occurring but not every event has a purpose in occurring.

To treat nature as if it were God would convert every fact into a moral judgment.

Who shall end up in hospital or hospice and who shall remain healthy is not a matter of will, divine or human.

Tshuvah, Tefillah, and Tzedakah cannot save me from death, but they can give me more life.

Daniel Gropper, The Four Things That Matter Most

Unclaimed baggage. We carry it with us wherever we go.

Teshuvah is a broad concept that goes to the very root of human existence.

"Please forgive me," "I forgive you," "thank you," and "I love you."

Forgiveness does not excuse someone from doing something wrong.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to Home Page

John L. Rosove, For the Sake of Peace

Each of us is broken somehow, and we and our community, are in need of r’fuah, healing, and tikkun, restoration.

Nations and people lack a clear understanding of what peace really is and what it will take to attain it.

Our tradition recognizes that while both peace and truth are high virtues they can’t coexist in human settings. We have to choose.

Attaining peace represents the highest of our Jewish aspirations.

Isaac Klein, Our Finest Hour: Yom Hazikaron

We remember the things we want to remember and forget the things we would like to forget.

The world has never been the same since, because our moral laws have been the basis for every society that wished to call itself civilized.

The synagogue has been a blessing to us and also to the world.

The history of a people is its biography, and biography is what we are.

Joel R. Schwartzman, A Formula for the Future

Given our human condition, when we attempt to achieve perfection, we often set ourselves, our loved ones and friends up for failure.

In place of reaching for perfection, the better idea is to pursue excellence.

Human beings lack the capacity to see all sides of life.

Becoming more mindful of the role God plays in our lives and of the gifts we indeed have at hand is one way of becoming more thankful, more sensitive, more reflective servants of our Creator.

One “gets there” and gets what these holidays are all about when they achieve humility, gratitude and altruism through a Divinely blessed and sanctioned quest for excellence.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to Home Page

Toba August, Three Ingredients for a Happy New Year

I am declaring that Rosh Hashanah is actually a time for joy and happiness. .

In the fabric of creation itself and built into the structure of Rosh Hashanah, is “guaranteed forgiveness."

Happiness is a state of mind. We can choose happiness with wisdom.

Living in Three Dimensions
by Hillel Silverman

It is vital that, at least once a year, we put aside business problems, politics, sports, even the world crisis, to consider the real meaning and value of life.

It is harmless to reminisce over the past so long as we see it in perspective, are not disgruntled with the present, and still retain hope for the future.

The pleasures of youth do not appeal to those of middle age.

Our lives will be fuller, richer, and deeper in meaning if we learn to live and think in all three dimensions; if we choose the best of the past, live wisely in the present, and plan and build for a brighter future

Martin Levy, Potential Choices for the Season

We all possess the power and insight to do teshuvah and to allow changes to strengthen our lives.

Teshuvah is more than just forgiveness. Teshuvah must be proactive and transformative.

The real power of forgiveness is not “I’m sorry” but that the process brings about a transformation.

Let's Take a Look at Ourselves
by Abram Vossen Goodman

The length of our lives may be in God’s hands; their form is in our own.

Our supply of life is limited. Let us not waste it.

We chose God long ago, and we cannot escape from duties and obligations that have descended from generation to generation through the centuries.

Each of us should come before God at our annual rendezvous with a sense of dissatisfaction.

Paul Plotkin, The Power of Changing

It is, I would argue, the obligation of each and every one of us to be constantly becoming someone else, someone better.

We have raised individualism in our society to the point of idolatry.

The only Jews who will survive the next hundred years, will be those who are, at some level, practicing the religion.

It is easier to cast off the yoke of Torah, to ignore its discipline, and its practice; than to learn the language, to learn the practice, the ways and the means of a time-tested religion that is our inheritance and our blessing.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Harold S. Kushner, The Measure of Our Success

Instead of the American definition where being successful means being attractive and productive, there is the Jewish definition of success where to be successful means to be wise and good. Not physical attractiveness, not making money, but wisdom and goodness, - that is what makes your life a success story.

A clever person knows how to get out of a situation that a wise one would never have gotten into in the first place.a clever person knows how to get out of a situation that a wise one would never have gotten into in the first place.a clever person knows how to get out of a situation that a wise one would never have gotten into in the first place.a clever person knows how to get out of a situation that a wise one would never have gotten into in the first place.

The opposite of goodness is selfishness, being so wrapped up in your own life that you never notice that there are other people out there in the world.

Alan Abraham Kay, Rosh Hashanah as the Birthday of Many Creations

A Spanish historian has written that Columbus was a member of a Spanish Jewish family that left Spain for Italy in about 1390 to escape the Inquisition.

As our lives are part of American history, so, too, are our lives part of American Jewish history.

Even though the colonial Jews still felt strong ties to one another and to Jews around the world, their community had a character all its own. As it does today.

I am proud to call my grandparents and yours, our ancestors.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Sidney Greenberg, Living Up to Our Dreams

As a temporary facade behind which to conceal untimely emotions, masks are not only permissible, they are priceless.

"There is a deep tendency in human nature to become like that which we imagine ourselves to be."

Deep within each of us there is an intimation of a larger human being, a grander self than we have ever been.

God is the power who helps us bridge the chasm between what we are and what we aspire to become.

David S. Goldstein, Life's Transitions

Wherever we may have been as Jews throughout the year, tonight we have come home.

Rosh Hashanah teaches that we need to liberate ourselves from the prisons of our past.

In truth, each of us has . . . a bank. Its name is time.

Transitions--Transitions that make all the difference.

[The] key is faith. It is faith. It has always been faith.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Jonathan L. Hecht, Our Thoughts on Rosh Hashanah

It is "time," the unrelenting passage of time.

Rosh Hashanah is an alarm clock: its wake up call is the blast of the shofar.

The shofar calls to us and reminds us that the time we have, no matter how we measure it, is passing.

This is the only script we are going to get in life and we have to play it to the end.

The reckoning of time is not in nature’s hands, but in our hands. We are the ones who determine time. We are in control of what happens in our lives.

A rock endures, humans live!

Baruch Cohon, A Pebble in the Pond

What kind of Jews begin year five thousand seven hundred sixty-two? Are we any closer to our beloved Creator?

I try. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I even fail to try.

Raymond A. Zwerin, Our Special Time

How do I best experience myself as a Jew?

What do I want from God, whatever I conceive that which is inconceivable to be?

For what am I most grateful?

What do I intend to accomplish the New Year?

Yossi Feintuch, Alaskan Exposure

[The High Holy Days] demand that we too chart and open new trails of living while attending to, and preserving our integrity, responsibilities and obligations to our religious and spiritual ecosystem.

It is the Jewish instinct to return to our heritage, to the faith of past generations, and to impart these quests to the next generation that has brought us here tonight.

Abraham and Sarah chose a new life that would replace for good their being locked up in a pattern of living that never changed and was therefore choking.

God will not force us to be good; that’s our challenge.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Harold M. Schulweis, Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Our tradition knows that I am not perfect. I am not unblemished, flawless. I have sins to confess and for which I seek forgiveness.

I cannot fool the silent dialogue within called "vidui," the confession between me and my God.

To forgive is not to forget. No one expects you to forget. No one believes that forgiveness eliminates the memory of the pain and anguish of the injury.

The power of reconciliation is in your hands, in your heart, in your mouth to do it.

Reconciliation is hard. It requires a measure of heroism and sacrifice.

When you gird your loins and seek reconciliation you teach your family that Judaism is real, that it makes a difference.

Emily Feigenson, A Day Made for Apologizing

Scripts can inhibit us from focusing on the times we have harmed someone accidentally or not.

Some resentments are so strong that families carry them to the graveside.

At this point in this holiday all the action is not up here, where I am--it is inside--inside each of us.

With us in this room sits so much fear. So much anger. So many words imagined, rehearsed, but unspoken.

The real gift of this season that we give ourselves is a pathway to humility.

Richard Wolberg, An Old Question - Revisited
If you want a sweet (and good) year, you have to work for it!

It is not so important where something comes from -- what's more important is where it is going and how it is utilized.

Edgar Weinsberg, The Circle of Life
Like boxers, we know that even after the "knockouts" we may have suffered this past year, the new year gives us a new chance to show that we can renew ourselves as we get back on our feet again.

With Rosh Hashanah we acknowledge that God is far more than the "King of the Beasts." He is the Universal King, as well as the Creator and Redeemer.

With the High Holydays we acknowledge that God has imbued us with some of His creative powers that can help us shape the new year for the better.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

David Geffen, The Torah and the Shofar
Our personal decisions will ultimately influence our national leaders.

We feed ourselves the vain delusion that it will be easier to uproot tomorrow the tyranny and terror which sadly may destroy us.

Life is the beautiful diamond we each possess. Let us constantly discover within it the many facets it contains.

Torah is written without vowels because God calls upon us to supply the vowels, form the words and thus enunciate its eternal message to the world.

Our genes may determine whether our eyes are blue or brown, but whether we look upon each other with cold indifference or warm compassion is for us to choose.

Too much faith sadly can turn one into a monster, an extremist who kills.

Bernard P. King, Returning Home
Each of us, spiritually, has problems with a sense of direction.

Truth is like folding over an old crease. It just feels right--it folds easily.

There is much in the past of each of us that we would gladly have foregone and have experienced differently if we could.

The more one knows about both baseball and Judaism, the more interesting and consuming both become.

Looking up and experiencing humility is the time-tested way of our people to score a run in the game of life.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Sermons on Basic Rosh Hashanah Themes,

Edited to Core Material

Sound the Horn
by Charles P. Sherman

There are those who refer to our part of the world as "tornado alley." We know the terrible power tornadoes have and the horrible damage they can suddenly inflict upon human beings, property, plans and hopes. We do not have the technology, at least not yet, to prevent tornadoes or, for that matter, hurricanes. So what we have tried to do is develop increasingly sensitive and sophisticated early warning systems. The idea is to provide people with a maximum amount of time to prepare for a terrible, often life-threatening storm

There are longer and shorter term preparations. We are being advised that when we build or remodel a house, we ought to construct a safe place, some room that has sturdy walls and no windows, which will be as impenetrable to forces of nature as possible. Next, we ought to store certain things there – battery-operated radio, flashlight, water, and some food. These are preparations made well in advance of the storm.

Then, we watch or listen to the early warning systems report that storms are getting closer and closer, until finally the sirens go off and tell us that we need to head to our safe place.

This is similar to our People’s ancient warning system, and very little has changed. We are supposed to build our lives on good values, and by the way we live prepare ourselves for the unforeseen, the unexpected. Next we have calendars which advise us when the Awesome Days are approaching when our ancestors believed that we were being judged and written in or excluded from the Book of Life. What could be more awesome?

Beginning on the first day of Elul, the month before the High Holydays, the siren sounds. When we look at our Hebrew calendar – we see that on the first of Elul that in traditional synagogues which have a morning minyan, the shofar is sounded at the conclusion of that service, as it will be on each weekday until Rosh Hashanah.

Tonight we gather in this safe place to begin a new year. How can we make it truly new for ourselves and, peRosh Hashanahaps, for that part of the world we touch. I have three quick suggestions for this month.

I. The first is to raise our standards. Judaism tells us to raise the standards of personal behavior and accountability and of the level of our compassion and decency as a community.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once gave us a descriptive but depressing analysis of our society. "Defining deviancy down." Moynihan underscored how we are cowardly redefining "moral" and "morality" to fit what we are doing anyway. In other words, we shoot the moral arrow and then draw the bull’s eye around it wherever it lands.

Let me be specific. Look at our society’s acceptance of foul language. The vulgarization of manners. The obscenities which sometimes masquerade as "art." Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote: "No one in the public eye calls any style of dress ‘cheap’ or ‘sleazy’ any more."

I am not an elitist. But it seems to me that today the so-called underclass defines what the rest of us are supposed to copy. Underclass behavior, slang, modes of dress, taste in music, become the norm for other classes to adopt, placate, or literally fear to challenge. Codes of honor, personal integrity, old fashioned manners are increasingly replaced by ethical relativism and by a values vacuum which seemingly invites – take what you want, gloat when you win, despise common courtesy as weakness, and do unto others before they do you.

As we prepare for a new year, Judaism says it does not have to be that way. We know better. We have been taught better. We have examples of better behavior. Let’s raise our standards.

II. Two. Actions – especially in Judaism – speak louder than words. Mere lip service to higher ideals will not get us anywhere. We have to actually remove the dirt from our lives. I am not an engineer. In fact, I am mechanically challenged, so I only know what I read about some things. They began building the Tower of Pisa – which most of us know as the Leaning Tower of Pisa – on August 9, 1173, almost 900 years ago. No one intended for it to lean, of course, but it did and it still does, and computer models have confirmed that this 32 million pounds of marble is headed for a fall sooner or later.

So several years ago a committee of engineers and scientists set about to save this tourist sight. It is interesting how they are doing it – centimeter by centimeter. What the engineers are doing is removing small bits of clay from beneath that tower through long thin pipes – about one or two shovelfuls every day. By removing these small amounts of dirt from the right places, the tower is very slowly tilting back towards stability. Now please do not worry, it will still lean just enough to maintain its novelty when the project is finished, but it will no longer threaten to topple.

I think that what the sound of the shofar during this month of Elul is saying is "don’t you think it is time to run a soul analysis on ourselves?" Aren’t we overdue for an honest check-up of the foundations upon which our own lives are built? One of my very favorite prophets is Amos. There is a great symbolic image in the Book of Amos. It says, hold out a plumb line over a crooked wall, cautioning his people that corruption – individual and collective – will ultimately lead to their downfall and to catastrophe. If the wall is out of plumb, if it is built on an illusion of stability and propriety, it is doomed to collapse.

This month we Jews are called upon to search our hearts and earnestly attempt to remove the dirt – the unworthy, the posturing and the appearance of virtue. We are summoned to find the courage to right our spirits little by little, not all at once, small clean-up steps, so that we may honorably stand before our Creator and before one another on Yom Kippur and say "I have changed."

III. Raise the standards, remove the dirt, and believe that a second chance is possible. Judaism does not offer cheap grace or easy atonement.

One day a young woman named Jane made a nasty comment to her mother. Jane’s mother told her how deeply wounded and hurt she was by her daughter’s words. Jane then responded that she was sorry for what she had done.

Her mother proceeded to tell Jane a story about a little girl who had received an expensive, beautiful, fancy doll house as a birthday gift.

One day the child became bored and for excitement decided to drive a nail in the doll house above its front door. Her mother returned later that afternoon from work and was appalled by what her daughter had done.

She had marred the appearance of the doll house, damaged a precious gift. The daughter explained that she was so sorry, and then pulled the nail out of the doll house – but, of course, the hole remained.

Jane’s mother drew the obvious lesson for her daughter. Even though the little girl had apologized, she still left behind irreparable damage to the doll house. Simply saying she was sorry did not undo the scar that her offense had caused.

On the one hand, I think, we would all agree with the moral of the story. Yet is it a tough story. Shouldn’t an apology be accepted and all else be forgiven? Why did the offended mother still imply that some anger and some hurt caused by her daughter’s cruel words remained? Why didn’t Jane’s saying she was sorry bring the incident to a successful resolution?

But if we will think about the story further, I believe we shall begin to appreciate its profundity. In some cases, an apology alone is insufficient. Saying "I am sorry" can be just a facile way of casting away responsibility for one’s behavior.

Apologies have, in some instances, become so insincere that they have gone the way of the thank-you note.

Our Jewish tradition provides ways to correct sins, missed marks, but not just by uttering "I am sorry;" additional steps are necessary. We must try to repair what can be repaired. We must resolve not to repeat the offense and act decisively and convincingly on that promise. When this process is successfully completed – teshuvah, true repentance, is the result.

Probably the greatest mind of the past thousand years or more in Jewish life was Moses Maimonides. He gives us an illustration of how true repentance is most effectively executed. He cites the example of a man who had unlawfully co-habited with a woman. (For those influenced by Moynihan’s "defining deviancy down," co-habited means "shacked up".) The man becomes remorseful and decides to repent for his sin. Some time later, he finds himself in a similar situation, and again feels attracted to the woman. Nonetheless, he restrains himself from succumbing to temptation. As a result, he becomes a true penitent. In other words, by being in a similar situation, he proved that the evil habit which caused the sin had now successfully been uprooted.

Therefore, this offense could be absolved.

Judaism does not want to let us off the hook too easily by a simple apology. Yet on the other hand, it does not want us to carry around a terrible burden of guilt for our misdeeds with no hope of rectifying the errors. A second chance is possible.

Rabbi Simcha Bunim reminds us that the sins we commit are not the worst thing. After all, temptation – the yatser ha-ra – is powerful, and we humans are sometimes weak. The greatest crime of human beings is that we can improve at any time and we do not.

The sounding of the shofar is an insistent reminder that self-improvement is a do-it-yourself proposition. Change is possible; the tekiah g’dola is a reminder that, having started the process, God will always help us to succeed. We do get a second chance, but we have to make the most of it.

(tekiah)

(I’m grateful to two long-time friends, Rabbis Edward Cohn and Samuel Stahl, for helping me shape this message.)

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Conversation with the Angel of Death   [not edited]
by Harold M. Schulweis

The letter from Lillian came between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur:

"I am writing to you as both my friend and my rabbi, driven by the deep sadness and sense of disconnectedness that has gripped me since this morning's Rosh Hashanah service.

Until this morning. I know the central liturgy of the holiday well, but before this year I had approached it in an abstract, intellectual manner. This year, I could not do so. Several months ago I had surgery for cancer, and I felt very keenly as I approached these days that in a real sense my fate for the coming year has been written, if not in a book of judgment, then in my own body. I look forward to health, but I may not be granted it. As I read, the questions of the service were familiar: "How many shall pass away and how many shall be born; who shall live and who shall die?" But the response -- "repentance, prayer, and righteousness avert the severe decree" -- for the first time carried a terrifying implication. It seemed to me as I read this that my own liturgy was binding my fate to my behavior, that my illness, seen in this light, has been the result of some terrible unknown transgression, and that the ultimate punishment for failure to discover and correct it could be my death.

I do not believe this -- not with my head nor my heart. Nevertheless, as a committed Jew who takes language very seriously and believes in community prayer, I would be forced to repeat this central cornerstone over and over should I attend services for Yom Kippur. It seems today that my choice is a terrible one: to flagellate myself emotionally by joining my congregation or to spare my feelings by isolating myself from my family, my friends, my community. It is a choice I never believed I would have to make.

I know there must be others in our congregation who sit suffering silently, as I did today, who wish to join Jews around the world at this time but find the price too high to pay. I do not write expecting an easy answer; holocaust literature has taught me there may be no answer at all. I write instead because I must, because to muffle my sadness and my anger will destroy something in the commitment I have worked so hard to build. I write from pain, hoping that from the expression of my dilemma will grow some insight, some way to cope."

There are times when religion is a matter of life and death. When it is not about getting the right seat in the sanctuary at High Holy days, or the convenient scheduling of the Bar Mitzvah or the catered wedding. There are times when religion, God, faith, prayer are truly taken to heart. Conversations around the hospital bed cut through the intellectual subtleties of theology into hard core of being, the amenities of wishing each other "a good writing and sealing" for the New Year. Facing sickness and death, our own or our family's or our friends, the foundations of our being are shaken. We pray differently then and we think differently then. We pray and listen hard. Lillian's letter would not let me go.

SANDRA IN THE HOSPITAL

Around the same time I received the letter, I was informed that another congregant, Sandra, was seriously ill. At our first conversation, Sandra began softly, "Please, Rabbi, don't lie to me. I have a fatal form of leukemia, and I know that I am dying. The doctors have been frank with me. I have two small children who go to your school. I love them and they love me. I have wonderful parents and a marvelously supportive husband. But I cannot make sense of it all. I don't ask 'why me?', but 'what for?' Life for me has been drained of all meaning. What have I these remaining weeks or months to live for. My children have given me so much meaning. I looked forward to being their mother. But I know now that I will not be able to raise them. My future has been cut off."

She told me that when she was in the hospital before Rosh Hashanah, a Rabbi had visited her and blown the shofar for her in the grim hospital room. She was grateful. He inquired as to the nature of her illness and then asked whether it was her practice to light Sabbath candles. She said she did and he answered, "Well then, you have nothing to worry about." He meant it as an assurance. But she thought, "What would he have said if she had answered no, or if he had asked her if she kept kosher?" At any rate, Sandra turned away from him, buried her head in the pillow and sobbed.

I thought of Lillian's letter and Sandra's resentment. But Sandra was too agitated and too ill for theological discussion. She was inconsolable and I wanted to make her better, to cheer her spirits. A book was brought to my attention, a best-seller by Dr. Bernie Siegel, a surgeon. The book is entitled Love, Medicine, and Miracles, and its subtitle read "Lessons Learned About Self-healing From A Surgeon's Experience With Exceptional Patients."

In my eyes Sandra was an exceptional patient. The book was filled with statistics, evidence, anecdotal accounts of patients successfully coping with death-threatening cancers, and cases of multiple sclerosis, arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, AIDS. Here were terminally ill patients who beat the odds. Resilient, adaptable, confident, with an unquenchable will to live, they defied the gloomy prognostications of their doctors, stuck their tongues out at their lugubrious predictions and refused to curl up and die.

These were the exceptional patients who refused to go gentle onto the operating table, whom -- according to Siegel -- doctors don't like because they are inquisitive, demanding, aggressive, "bad" patients. These are the patients who don't venerate the physicians or surgeons as M. D.'s -- an acronym, cynics say, for Medical Deities, and who if they are not satisfied, change doctors.

Before reading the book, Sandra told me of the doctors' terrible prognosis. I told her that doctors are not prophets and that according to the Sages, "Prophesy in our times has fallen into the hands of children and fools." "Sandra," I said, "remember doctors are not Gods." Sandra liked that, told it to her doctor who responded, "Well, neither are Rabbis."

Now I had a book written by a surgeon of oncology to shore up her spirits. The book I gave Sandra started out with a bold statement from Norman Cousins' Anatomy of an Illness, "Patients divided themselves into two groups. Those who were confident they would beat back the disease and be able to resume normal lives and those who resigned themselves to a prolonged and even fatal illness."

Those who had an optimistic view had a higher percentage of "discharged as cured" than the others in the tuberculosis sanitarium where Cousins was sent. There appears to be a "physiology of optimism." There are peptide molecules in the body releasing "wonder drugs within": endorphins, interleukims, interferons.

I've liked Norman Cousins ever since I heard about his advocacy and practice of watching Marx Brothers films as a form of therapy. My own cardiologist, I decided, has no sense of humor. Siegel throughout maintains that "instead of turning fighters into victims, we should be turning victims into fighters." The book is sprinkled with success stories of exceptional patients whose attitude and will gave them hope and extended their lives. I meant the Siegel book to help her. But it boomeranged on her. The book angered, then saddened her. I re-read the book this time through Sandra's eyes.

THE VICTIM'S GUILT

For Sandra, the success of the exceptional patients was her failure, their victories her defeats, their cures her misery. "What's wrong with me. I have tried, God knows I have tried. I have gritted my teeth. Taken the chemotherapy, the medicines. I have given love and been loved in turn. Why can't I will myself into wellness like those others?"

Psychological literature speaks of "survivors' guilt", those tortured by their good fortune to survive while others fall. Soldiers who have seen their buddies wounded and killed while they leave the battlefield unscathed; survivors of concentration camps who witnessed the suffering and murder of their fellow inmates while they are spared. Sandra was suffering from "victim's guilt", the guilt of the failed, the ordinary, unlucky, condemned. She couldn't forgive herself for her unexceptionality.

I read it again and then read Siegel's new book, Peace, Love, and Healing, a clone of the first book, to better understand Sandra's reaction. There Siegel quotes with favor a novelist who writes that "Illness doesn't strike randomly like a thief in the night. Certain kinds of people at certain points in their lives will come down with certain ailments. You can almost predict it."

He cites Ray Berti, a college professor at Massachusetts battling throat, bone marrow and other types of cancer for fourteen years, who finally sees the light. "The critical thing for me was when I said to myself, 'Ray, somehow or other you're causing it. I am the cause.'" Paradoxically, the book which intended to offer her morale, to rid the patient of passive dependency, delivered a double whammy. First, she felt responsible for her lack of attitude that made her susceptible to the disease, and now she felt responsible for not snapping out of it.

I understand Siegel's argument that patients become too acquiescent, passive, and dependent; that patients frequently abandon their responsibility. The reversal of that dependence was popularized two decades ago among psychological cults. As one of the celebrated psychologists put it, "I am me. Therefore everything that comes out of me is authentically mine because I alone chose it. I own everything about me. My body, my mind, my eyes. I own my fantasies, my dreams, my fears, my triumphs, my failures, my mistakes. I own me and therefore I can engineer me. I am me and I am okay."

If you are indeed all that, you have no one to blame but yourself, you are the cause. I have a rabbinic friend who a few years ago found himself immobilized, his bodily movements painfully restricted. The paralysis was shown not to be organic. He consulted all kinds of doctors and psychologists and was recommended to a psychologist whose specialty is hypnosis. After going there, he told the doctor, "I'm not being helped." "You will be helped," said the psychologist, "when you're ready." So the failure to recover was a failure of will. Not can't but won't blocks your cure.

Paul Cowan, the author, in his last article for the Village Voice (May 17, 1988) before his own death from leukemia, commented on the need to confront the awesome, mysterious power of his disease. "Otherwise, if the leukemia cells re-enter my bone marrow, I run the risk myself for relapsing and if I continue to weaken, of raging at my psyche instead of fighting back." The dark side of faith in will is self blame.

THE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD OF WILL

This is part of the new tyranny of the will. We live in a climate of desperate voluntarism. We are raised to believe in the omnipotence of the will. We have been read to in our childhood and pass its theology onto our children. The little engine chugging its way up the mountain with the endless refrain: "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..." until triumph flashes, "I knew I could."

We live in a popular culture of will and wish. Peter Pan reaches out to the audience to have it pray with the hands to revive Tinker Bell. And we do it. Faith will revive. Faith will resurrect. Faith will redeem. Faith will cure...if you only believe yourself into recovery. Will is the secular form of faith. Will can move mountains and remove illness. Things just don't happen. We choose them. We make ourselves sick and well.

So Siegel declares, "Psychologists long ago discovered that emotions can be modified merely by adopting the facial expression of a contrary emotion." Indeed Dr. Paul Ekman of U.C. at San Francisco distinguishes 18 anatomically different types of smiles. It calls to mind Dr. Smiley Blanton, a popular psychologist, who would convince his audiences that with their cooperation, he could convert their sadness to happiness. He would instruct his audience to smile and when they parted their lips and showed their teeth, challenged them to be simultaneously sad. "When you smile," he concluded, "you control your emotions." Smiling has made you happy. Photographers have developed this philosophy into a photogenic technique. "Look happy Rabbi," they instruct me, asking me to stop eating and stand behind the other seated guests. I don't look happy because at the moment I'm not happy, and smiling is not the appropriate expression now. "Say cheese," the photographer advises. I obey and later, after the film has been developed he boasts that he had captured my happiness. Others, seeing the picture, comment on my joy. In truth, however, the photographer had not immortalized happiness, he had only captured "cheese."

The triumphalism of the will ignores what wisdom understands: the limitations of will. I can will my smile--I cannot will my happiness. I can will my eating, I cannot will my hunger. I can will going to sleep, I cannot will my dreams. I can will knowledge, I cannot will wisdom. I can will my self-assertion, I cannot will my courage. I can will shaving, combing, dressing up--I cannot will my joy. I can will purchasing flowers, perfume, candies--I cannot will love. I can will fasting, the recitation of the litany of transgression--I cannot will remorse. I can will opening the prayer book and Bible--I cannot will belief. "A wink is not a blink." One I will, one I do not. I can will many things, but I cannot will my will.

During my own past illness, I recall feeling frightened and sad and later at night turning to a channel which fortuitously, was showing "A Night At The Opera," a Marx Brothers classic, Norman Cousins' counsel did not work with me. I did not laugh. The Marx brothers were not funny, nothing was funny. I could not will feeling funny. Should I have felt failure because of my inability to laugh? How have I no sense of humor now that I need it?

A JEWISH VIEW OF WILL

Judaism celebrates freedom of will. It has from the time of the Bible on struggled against pre-destination theologies, against fate. But there is a deeper wisdom in Judaism -- a Reality Principle -- that knows the limitations of will. Judaism present s more balanced portrayal of the human condition.

"By dint of force are you born. By dint of force you die." And that helps me interpret differently the "who shall live, who shall die?" prayer that troubles Lillian.

"How many shall pass away and how many shall be born; who shall perish by fire and who by water, who by earthquake and who by plague?" I do not know. For these matters are not matters of will--neither my will, your will, or God's will. For me the litany refers to natural events, births, deaths, accidents, sicknesses over which I have no control. They are not God's punishments or rewards. What then are they? If they are not the "acts of God" are they the acts of the Devil?

The Talmud (Avodah Zarah 54b) is helpful here. It refers to "the ways in which Nature pursues its course." The Talmud uses this expression in arguing against a simplistic explanation of patently immoral events. The sages ask, "Suppose a man stole a measure of wheat and then sowed it in the ground. Clearly it would be right for that wheat not to grow. That would be the 'din', the judgment were this a case brought to the rabbinic courts. But 'the world pursues its own natural course and as for the fools who act wrongly (i.e. for those who stole the wheat) they will have to render an account.'" They offer another illustration: Suppose a man has intercourse with his neighbor's wife. It would be morally right that she should not conceive but we must acknowledge that "the world pursues its natural course and as far as the transgressors who act wrongly are concerned, they will have to render an account."

I understand the sages to be cautioning us not to confuse biology with morality; not to confuse the procreative process with the process of the law; not to confuse physical laws of nature with moral laws. Every event has a cause but not every cause is morally determined. Every event has a reason for occurring but not every event has a purpose in occurring. The cancer I have is not God's curse for my sin. The heart attack is not God's punishing rod to whip me into repentance. Not all events are judgments.

There are consequences to my taking a contaminated needle for the sake of transfusion. My contraction of AIDS is a consequence but a consequence is not a punishment, and a reason explaining why a sickness occurs is not a moral judgment. The infant born addicted may be a consequence of the substance abuse of its parent, but consequence is not purpose or judgment or justification for the addiction. Such distinctions must be drawn if we are not to condemn ourselves to lives of masochistic dread and guilt or to turn God into an indiscriminate punisher.

Nature is not God. And to treat nature as if it were God would convert every fact into a moral judgment. An earthquake into God's smoldering anger against sinners, rainfall into a reward. That outlook breathes a spirit animism that sees ghosts in rocks and waters, in lesions in the skin and leprous rashes. That theology turns sado-masochistic. Unintentionally, it turns God into a mysterious sadistic God and man into a masochist with a taste for suffering.

Those who seek desperately for justification of evil and suffering frequently turn to the "Helen Keller defense" popularized in a poem. "At birth deny a child vision, hearing and the ability to speak and you have a Helen Keller. Raise him in abject poverty and you have an Abraham Lincoln. Stab him with Rosh Hashanaheumatic pain until opiates are needed and you have a Steinmetz."

The truth in the argument is that there are people who can make virtue out of necessity, who can transcend suffering and use it to spur them on to greatness. The falsehood in the argument is in pointing to heroism and courage as justification for human suffering, agony and death. That mentality would argue that poverty is good because it gives people an opportunity to be charitable; that sickness is good because it offers medical science challenge, that suffering is good for it tests character. With some theologies, the facts of sickness, suffering and death are converted into divine intention. Purpose is read into calamity by interpreting it as either God's punishment or God's reward. What "is" is turned into what "ought to be."

Dr. Siegel writes, "I suggest that patients think of illness not as God's will but as our deviation from God's will." He thinks patients must acknowledge "the absence of spirituality" in their lives. To avoid blaming God and therein the assumption of the patient's responsibility, Siegel inadvertently turns the patient into a scapegoat.

To see in illness a deviation from God's will is a retrograde piety. Who shall end up in hospital or hospice and who shall remain healthy is not a matter of will, divine or human. If it were, life would be filled with false guilt, blame and accusation. Sickness would justify the infantile unending taunt: "It serves you right. You get what you deserve." Susan Sontag (AIDS And Its Metaphors) recalls painfully the fictions of responsibility that attended her becoming a cancer patient. Cancer was regarded as a disease to which "the physically defeated, the inexpressive, the repressed" are particularly prone.

BLAME

This society is saturated with the need to blame, to find fault. It is as if there cannot be any explanation of events without someone to fault. How remarkable the Talmudic insight "nature pursues its own course."

Elsewhere Dr. Siegel contends, "I feel that all disease is ultimately related to a lack of love...that all disease is ultimately related to the inability to give and accept unconditional love."

That bit of generalizing philosophy unintentionally adds insult to injury. Sandra loved deeply, loved her family, her friends; she was involved in the synagogue, with the developmentally disabled. She was gifted with social conscience. Inadvertently, Siegel ends with blame of the failed patient for not having the right kind of self-love or altruism. He is caught up in a secular guilt trip.

LILLIAN'S LETTER

I return to Lillian's letter and to the conversation I had with her. For her the "who shall live and who shall die?" prayer sent a shiver in her, a threat of future punishments for past transgressions. And the more hopeful conclusion that repentance, prayer, and charity would avert the evil decree rubbed salts in her wounds. Had she not lived, repented, prayed, and been charitable before she contracted her illness? And is that illness a "decree," a verdict, a judgment upon her from up high? How should she understand the prayer? How do I pray the "netaneh tokef?"

For me the Netaneh Tokef questions with which the prayer opens means that there are areas in life over which I have no control. It confesses my creatureliness, my dependence on nature. There are amoral features in nature which should not be explained as if nature were a rabbinic tribunal. Part of the prayer expresses the Jewish reality principle. I accept the laws of nature, the withering of the leaves, the breaking of the boughs, the miscarriages in birth, the congenital and non-congenital disease. I accept the limitations that nature places on me. Moreover, Judaism does not encourage me to pray for a suspension or modification of the laws of nature. Judaism's reality principle calls prayers that seek to reverse the laws of nature, that pray that what events take place did not "tefillat shov", vain, empty prayers. Jewish faith is not magic.

Much as I would desire it I cannot pray away the damage done to my heart nor pray away the tumor from my colon nor will the growth of arms and legs onto my paraplegia.

But that wisdom of acceptance is not the acceptance of impotence, that reality principle does not paralyze the proper areas and functions of my mind, heart and will. That is the meaning of "turning, prayer, and charity." Those are the areas over which I do have control. I cannot alter the world of nature outside, but I can effect the world within. As Albo in the Ikarim asserts, my prayer actions do not change God; they change me. (IV Chapter 18)

Maimonides (Hilchoth Avodah Zarah 11-12) offers a crucial distinction between the healing of the body and the healing of the spirit (refuath ha-guf; refuath ha-nefesh). "To read a scriptural verse or place a Torah or a pair of tefilin on a child so that he may sleep is not only the way of diviners and fortune tellers, but it uproots the Torah -- for they who practice in this manner make the Torah a healer of the body whereas the Torah is a healer of the spirit."

Jewish faith-healing does not pretend to cure the cancer with the willful laying on of the hands. God is not found in the leukemia. God is found in the character and meaning latent in the patient. Meaning is not in the deafness or blindness or muteness or lameness--that is nature's course, not God's will.

When Sandra asked what meaning in the life remained to her which was tied up to her raising her children, we explored the possibilities of meaning. Sandra agreed that she wanted to raise them to be strong, to help them learn how to cope with the abrasiveness of life, how to face the challenge of adversity. Are these not the wishes of a mother?

"Your children, Sandra, know how sick you are. And you are teaching them lessons they will cherish the rest of their lives. Sick and suffering, you teach them how to love, how to cling to faith. Living, you teach. Dying, you teach dignity, courage and meaning. And so it is with your husband and your family and your friends. Sandra, you are meaning. There is a midrash that informs that 'the righteous are informed of the day of their death so that they may hand the crown to their children.'"

I would not lie to Sandra or Lillian or to myself. Who shall live or die, how long I shall live is not in our control. And God whom I worship is no enemy of mine, no implacable, inaccessible Judge. God is my ally, my strength and my friend. And as I tap into the curative forces within the soul into which God breathed life, I may make my life a blessing. Tshuvah, Tefillah, and Tzedakah cannot save me from death, but they can give me more life.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

The Four Things That Matter Most
by Daniel Gropper

[Submitted June, 2006]

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons depicts a baggage carousel at an airport. Arriving passengers are standing around collecting their luggage. Off to the side is a large area holding unclaimed luggage. Each bag is tagged with a large name tag. But instead of the labels having names like Smith, Goldberg or Strauss, these baggage tags list states like: guilt, depression, anger, sadness, unresolved issues, overbearing parents, among other unclaimed bags.

What a perfect image. Unclaimed baggage. We carry it with us wherever we go. We even shlepp it into shul. Here we bring our lousy religious school experiences, the times we felt slighted by a member of the professional staff or some other congregational leader, our issues with God. So tonight and during these Yamim Noraim I need to ask you a favor. Put down your baggage. Put it down. Let go of it, if but only for a few hours. Trust me; your baggage will be waiting for you when you leave. And be rest assured of something else. Nobody here will claim the wrong person’s baggage. It is yours and yours alone.

Two hasids journeying home came to the banks of a fast-flowing river, where they met a young woman unable to cross the current alone. One of the hasids picked her up in his arms and set her safely on her feet on the other side and the two continued on their travels. The hasid who had crossed the river alone could finally restrain himself no longer and began to rebuke his friend, "Do you not know it is against our rules to touch a young woman? You have broken the holy vows."

The other hasid answered, "Brother, I left that young woman on the banks of the river. Why are you still carrying her?"

Tonight we enter into the Aseret Yamai T’shuvah, the ten days of repentance, as season of forgiving. Tonight we begin the process of t’shuvah, a process of fixing ourselves so that we may enter Yom Kippur in 10 days with a clear conscience, an open mind and a renewed spirit. To do this we have to begin by letting go.

Our tradition views t’shuvah as a process. It begins with Cheshbon HaNefesh, with an accounting of the soul. It is about admitting where we missed the mark in our personal interactions. Where were we not as present as we could have been? Where did we lose our temper? How did we talk to our employees, our bosses? Did we speak with our spouses with dignity? Did we respect our parents? Did we lift up the esteem of our children with our words or did we tear them down?

The second step is Selichah. It means "excuse me." It is all about asking for forgiveness; not only saying, "I’m sorry" but honestly exploring our deeds and words and then going to the person whose forgiveness we seek and saying, "please forgive me…" Selichah isn’t easy. It takes courage. It takes humility. The need to forgive and be forgiven simply means that we’re not perfect. Selichah requires a letting go of our own ego and self-righteousness to look to another and say, "I wronged you… please forgive me." But it is possible. Our tradition teaches that God forgives. So if God can, so can we.

The ultimate goal is t’shuvah, a returning to God and a higher awareness of self. Teshuvah is a broad concept that goes to the very root of human existence. Thankfully it exists within our tradition for without it new levels of relationship beyond the most childlike would be impossible. Teshuvah is all about re-establishing the intimacy and trust that existed between God and each of us from the beginning. It is a returning to the source, not a re-creation of innocence but rather, the creation of new relationships, more mature and intimate because they have faced and overcome moments of doubt and betrayal. And it all starts with putting down some baggage. Moving to t’shuvah requires a Letting Go.

This summer, I had to let go of a lot of personal baggage; namely a lot of old stuff that still existed between my sister and me. As you know, my sister died in June. In late May I spent hours at her bedside. I held her hand. I stroked her forehead. I massaged her feet. I talked to her and asked her for her forgiveness. All that I said to her I did so with her in an unconscious state. What I said to her, some of which I will share with you tonight, I did so praying that the words and the sentiments entered her soul. I think they did. So with your understanding I will share part of my journey with you. I hope it gives all of us the opportunity to use what I will share with you as a vehicle to do our own slichah and t’shuvah with the people we love during these ten days and beyond.

I received a book that allowed me to do t’shuvah with my sister, a book whose lessons can serve as a path to t’shuvah for these days of Awe and throughout our lives. The book is called: The Four Things That Matter Most by Doctor Ira Byock. The Four Things that Matter Most are four simple phrases that carry enormous power. They are: "Please forgive me," "I forgive you," "thank you," and "I love you." In many ways these phrases contain the most powerful words in our language. They provide the tools of repentance, guiding us through the thickets of interpersonal difficulties to a conscious way of living that is full of integrity and grace.

People’s need to feel forgiven – and to forgive – is a recurring lesson in every spiritual tradition. In the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche writes: "All religions stress the power of forgiveness, and this power is never more necessary, nor more deeply felt than when someone is dying. Through forgiving and being forgiven, we purify ourselves of the darkness of what we have done, and prepare ourselves most completely for the journey through death." (Byrock, p. 37).

Many people confuse forgiveness with exoneration. Forgiveness does not excuse someone from doing something wrong. It does not alleviate their guilt or lesson their transgression. Instead, forgiveness accepts the past as it was, embraces the present, and faces the future. Forgiveness is a strategy to become free of emotional baggage.

Late one night after the sun had set, I found myself alone with my sister. I took her limp hand in mind and put another on her forehead. I listened to her breathing. With tears streaming down my cheeks I sang the same blessings to her that Tamara and I sing to our sons each night. Then I tried practicing the four things that matter most. "Please forgive me" I said. "Please forgive me for teasing and tormenting you when we were younger. Please forgive me for not standing up for you when you were in trouble and when you really needed a big brother to do that for you. Please forgive me for being more interested in how much money you made as a consultant rather than the creative things you were doing. And please forgive me for talking and offering advice when I should have just listened."

Then I told her that I forgave her. I forgave her for organizing my vacation schedule instead of consulting me. I forgave her for getting me into tough situations when we were teenagers where I had to bail us both out of. And I forgave her for peRosh Hashanahaps the hardest thing of all. I forgave her for always being forgiving of me, for letting me off the hook….

Did I feel better? A little. In a perfect world my sister and I would have had the conversation differently. Truth be told we probably would never have had it. Who needs to? It’s easier to live with the unresolved stuff pushed way down deep inside, easier to keep shlepping the baggage wherever we go. Having these conversations only dredges this old stuff to the surface. Who needs it? I did. We all do.

So if we had had the conversation, I imagine it going something like this….I would have talked, she would have responded. She would have talked, I would have responded. We probably would have yelled and sworn and slammed a few doors as well.

What I can tell you is that asking for forgiveness and offering it was affirming for me. It was a way of putting down some of that old baggage. I know that relationships involve two people. We can only take care of our part. By making a good-faith effort I completed my side of the relationship. I know that I did all I could and was free of a set of "should haves," "could haves," and "what ifs" that might have nagged at me forever.

But just because I had put down my baggage I knew I wasn’t finished. I owed my sister more. I owed myself more. The third most important thing you can say is, "thank you." Our tradition calls this hoda’ah. When we wake up in the morning our first words should be, "modeh ani lefanecha, thank you God for restoring my soul to me." In the Amidah when we say the hoda’ah or thanksgiving prayer we are to bow over a little at the waist. Both of these prayers are an act of humility. Both remind us that we are really not Master’s of the Universe, God is. Saying Thank You keeps us humble.

Thank you, I said. Thank you for always listening to me and for offering me such great advice. Thank you for sharing your life, your kids, your frustrations, your joys and your sadness’ with me. Thank you for being such a cool aunt to my sons and a wonderful sister to my wife. Thank you for keeping me real and keeping me honest. Thank you for reading sermons like this one and telling me that you would rather talk about real life than the life of some rabbi who lived 2,000 years ago. Thank you for sometimes reminding me to live life and to worry about paying for it later. And thank you for always telling me to live strong and to just do it.

Whenever my sister and I would end a conversation we would always say, "I love you." So I told her that I loved her. I told her that the love we had for each other would never die. In fact, it might even grow stronger over the years. Funny but it’s true, absence does make the heart grow stronger. There is a line near the end of the Song of Songs which says, "love is stronger than death." I always had trouble with that line, until now. Death is a great teacher. When someone dies, it is the physical presence that is missed. We miss the opportunity to experience things with the other and to feel what it feels like to experience those moments with them. We miss hearing their voice, listening to their opinions, smelling their scent, feeling their touch. But love, as we know, can never die. Just as an atomic particle can never be destroyed, only changed; the same is true with love. Its state is only altered relative to each new situation.

As I share these thoughts with you, on what would have been Naomi’s 35th birthday, I know that love doesn’t die, people do. And by saying those three small yet essential words, I sealed for myself the truth for Naomi and I; that our love would endure forever.

In that darkened hospital room, I spoke the four things that matter most and I began to put down some of my baggage. It does not mean that I no longer grieve. I, as many of us do, carry our losses with us wherever we go. I have not fully accepted that I won’t see my sister the next time I travel. I probably still have more to say to her. We always had more to say. By speaking those four things, I began a process toward teshuvah, a journey to a place of wholeness and acceptance. A place of being at peace with my memories, both the good and the bad, and to see those memories as blessings, not as something to be eradicated and erased from the hard drives of our lives.

The Four Things are powerful tools for reconciling the rifts that divide us and restoring the closeness we innately desire. When bad feelings occur in our close relationships, we tend to put off the work required to make things right. We always assume we’ll have another chance… later. That’s understandable, but it’s a mistake. Feeling resentful toward the people we love, or once loved, feeling distant from them erodes our happiness.

A brush with death often instills in us a newfound appreciation for the gift of life. Simple pleasures feel like miracles – a cup of tea, sunshine on one’s face, the voices of our children. When we’ve had a close call that shakes us up or when we’ve walked alongside a loved one who has died, the anger we felt towards people closest to us no longer seems significant. Ill will can dissolve in love, appreciation and affection, and we recognize the urgency of seeking forgiveness, pardon and atonement or as Ira Byrock calls it, "mending, tending, and celebrating our relationships."

Because accidents and sudden illness do happen, it is never too soon to express forgiveness, to say thank you and I love you to the people who have been an integral or intimate part of our lives, and to say good-bye as a blessing. These simple words hold essential wisdom for transforming that which matters most in our lives – our relationships with the people we love. [1]

As you know by now, I have a habit of asking you to think of something or to do something when you leave the sanctuary on Erev Rosh HaShanah. I call it the "instead of critiquing the rabbi’s sermon exercise." Tonight and over the next 10 days, try practicing the Four Things that matter most. Who is there in your life to whom you need to say, "Please forgive me, I forgive you, thank you and I love you." You can never say these things enough. Our tradition sets aside this time for selichah and teshuvah. It is an opportunity to right wrongs. It is a chance to mend fences. Don’t wait, because hate, fury, recrimination and blame weigh us down. The ball and chain of old wounds tethers us to the past and limits our ability to move forward with vitality. We all have baggage that needs to be set down. All of us has something in our lives that needs repairing.

In the town of Berdichev, where the famous Rabbi Levi Yitzhak lived, there was a very poor shoemaker. As he had no money, he was forced to walk the streets looking for people who needed their shoes fixed. It happened one day that Rabbi Levi Yitzhak was standing at the doorway of his house when the shoemaker passed by. The shoemaker cried out desperately, "Rabbi, surely you have something that needs fixing?!"

Upon hearing these words, Rabbi Levi Yitzhak began to cry. He turned to his wife who was standing near by and said, "You see, even he can tell that I need to fix myself."

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak was so connected to self renewal through self examination that he was able to hear how each life encounter was a gateway to change and growth. Tonight is such a gateway.

Beginning tonight and over these next ten days, practice the four things that matter most: Take the time to speak with the ones you love. And say to them, "Please forgive me, I forgive you, thank you and I love you."

Oh, and that baggage you brought with you to shul? It’s still here, waiting for you. And should you choose to leave it, don’t worry, we won’t call you to come and pick it up.

[1] Ira Byrock, MD. The Four Things That Matter Most. P. 7-8.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page        |        Return to First Page

For the Sake of Peace
by John L. Rosove

[Submitted 2006]

Shalom Aleichem! May peace be upon you! A simple greeting, but from the Jewish point of view shalom aleichem is far from simple.

It’s an odd greeting, if we think about it, juxtaposed to our people’s long history of persecution, suffering, displacement, and grief. Our collective memory is hardly peaceful. And, given that peace is so lacking in our world today, the greeting shalom aleichem certainly describes no existing world that I know. Peace is sadly absent within Jewish life too,

And there’s little peace too within many of our families. Husbands and wives often move through the days, weeks, months, even years resigned, hostile and alienated from each other. Many parents and their grown children don’t speak. Siblings rarely see one another. Dysfunction within families seems too often the rule and not the exception.

Our world isn’t whole, nor are we, which is why we are here during these Days of Awe, to tend to the frectured places in our lives. Each of us is broken somehow, and we and our community, are in need of r’fuah, healing, and tikkun, restoration.

Peace! I know no one who doesn’t claim to want it for the world, for our people, for our families and relationships, and for ourselves. Even those waging war say they want it, and they may even be serious about it. But we have to ask if everyone wants it, why do we so consistently fail in achieving it?

Part of the problem is that nations and people lack a clear understanding of what peace really is and what it will take to attain it. To begin to really understand peace it is worthwhile to ask not ‘what is peace’, but rather ‘what is the opposite of peace?’ In response, most would say that the opposite of peace is...war. And, it’s true, but the opposite of peace is also Truth. (see Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, Jerusalem Post, May 31, 1996) What does this mean?

Truth is that which is abstract, theoretical, and conceptual pointing to an ideal and absolute state. Truth requires an unbending, no-nonsense approach to life and relationships. "True" is either/or, black/white, right/wrong, good/evil. It’s exact and exacting, uncompromising, precise, rigid, and hard. There is no gray in Truth.

In contrast "peace" is expansive, open, embracing, inclusive, soft, down to earth, complex. Peace results not by the parties pursuing their separate truths, but rather from accommodation, cooperation, concession, conciliation, and compromise. Peace needs shades of gray.

For a peaceful resolution to any conflict to be stable and sustainable over the long term, be it in the international or national arenas, between ethnic and religious groups, between friends and within our families, each side must be able to walk away from the negotiation having saved face, to be able to claim at least a limited victory, and to emerge with one’s dignity and self-respect preserved.

Peaceful compromise prevents either side from asserting after the fact that it landed a knockout punch and was completely victorious. In any successful negotiation each side must come away a little happy and a little unhappy. Such is the art of the deal.

Recall Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s journey to Israel in 1977 that resulted in the Camp David Peace Accords. Egypt had been humiliated by Israel’s lightning victory in the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel destroyed the entire Egyptian air force while it still sat on the ground.

Before Sadat could ever make peace with Israel he knew that he had to restore his nation’s dignity and honor. And so he launched the 1973 Yom Kippur War on our holiest of days and caught Israel unaware. Though Israel would eventually soundly defeat Egypt on the battlefield, Sadat was able to claim at least a limited victory because of Egypt’s initial onslaught against Israeli troops lounging in their underwear on Sinai’s Bar Lev line.

Sadat’s limited victory restored Egypt’s national honor and allowed him to offer Israel what it had yearned for since the establishment of the State but never received--acceptance by her largest Arab neighbor as a sovereign nation. In exchange Israel give up the entire Sinai including its oil wells.

Religious and nationalist ideologues and extremists, and members of our families who are alienated and at war with each other will never attain peace and reconciliation as long as they insist upon their Truth being preserved in its totality. Peace requires that the parties take their two irreconcilable "Truths" and choose: If they want Truth they should get ready for war. And if they want peace, they must surrender Truth. Our Talmud puts it like this: "If there is absolute truth there is no peace; and if there is peace there is no absolute truth." Our tradition recognizes that while both peace and truth are high virtues they can’t coexist in human settings. We have to choose.

Compromise leading to peace is so important a core value in Judaism, even above that of Truth itself, that the Talmud considers it a mitzvah (Bavli, Sanhedrin 6b).

In its effect shalom - peace - points to an overarching state of harmony and balance that is far greater than the sum of all of its parts. It’s a condition "of well-being, tranquility, prosperity, and security, circumstances unblemished by any sort of defect." To be sure, shalom "is a blessing...", "a manifestation of [chesed] divine grace." (Professor Aviezer Ravitzky, Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, p. 685)

We usually think of peace in the context of relations between and with nations. However, it’s important to note that most passages in Jewish literature on peace aren’t concerned with the macro issues at all. Rather, they refer to our relationships with each other, within our families and with non-Jews.

A category of law developed in the Talmud based on the principle "Mipnei darchei shalom" - things we do "for the sake of the ways of peace." For example:

"Our rabbis taught: ‘We support the non-Jewish poor along with the poor of Israel, and visit the non-Jewish sick along with the sick of Israel, and bury the non-Jewish poor with the dead of Israel, mipnei darchei shalom - for the sake of peace." (Gittin 61a)

Mipnei darchei shalom embraces both our practical concerns about how we’re going to get along with each other and our neighbors and the virtue of altruism.

I recall years ago a conversation at the Reform movement’s biennial convention between the then President of the UAHC, Rabbi Alexander Schindler (z"l) and a large group of delegates. In open discussion one woman asked, ‘Rabbi - there are so many important Jewish and non-Jewish causes to which we can contribute our tz’dakah money. As a Jew I want to support my people. My question is, given that the Jewish people’s needs are so great and endless, should I give to non-Jewish causes as well?’

Rabbi Schindler said, ‘you have to contribute to Israel and our Jewish causes because if not us then who? But you have to contribute to everything else as well not only because it’s the morally responsible thing for Jews to do and nurtures our altruistic impulses, but mipnei darchei shalom - for the sake of the ways of peace between us and the world."

Mipnei darchei shalom – for the sake of the ways of peace - was movingly applied by Israel towards her own citizens. Before the disengagement of the Israeli settlements from Gaza and four small settlements in the West Bank, Israelis were deeply worried that the government’s action would provoke settler violence and a civil war. Whatever you may have felt about the disengagement, whether Israel should have done it or not, all of us have to agree that the manner in which the Israeli police and military behaved towards the settlers was a shining and extraordinarily proud moment in the history of the State of Israel.

For months the military and police trained its troops to be gentle, empathetic, compassionate, and kind in their treatment of the settlers as they evacuated them from their homes. Only older more mature reserve soldiers were selected to enter the settlements. Many were married with children, thus enabling them to empathize with the life circumstances of the settlers. Only women soldiers removed female settlers to protect the modesty and dignity of these religious women. No soldier carried a weapon to reduce potential provocation. All wore uniforms without the Tzahal (Israel Defense Forces) insignia and donned the Israeli flag instead, an emblem of national unity shared by the settlers and soldiers alike.

Soldiers personally opposed to the withdrawal were encouraged to share their emotions with the settlers. Many wept in each others arms and davened together - mipnei darchei shalom, for the sake of the ways of peace.

The military and police behaved in an exemplary fashion with patience, kindness and love, mipnei darchei shalom, for the sake of peace.

There is sadly a powerful absence of peace within too many of our families as well. I’m aware of many husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, former friends and colleagues, who’ve been wounded by each other over time, who’ve given and endured harsh and hurtful speech, who harbor petty jealousies and nurture misunderstandings, anger and resentments, and who have, worst of all, have perpetrated and born abuse of all kinds.

Some relationships have been destroyed and personal healing is necessary. Others are damaged but able to be salvaged. Many of us, however, are afraid to confront those we feel have wronged us assuming that the other is so wedded to his or her Truth, and we’re so wedded to our own Truth that no one will budge anyway. We might be right, and there may be, in truth, little or no hope for reconciliation.

But we might be wrong, that meeting might initiate a process of t’shuvah and reconciliation that will bear unexpected fruit. Meeting one on one may be too difficult and threatening for many of us, and peRosh Hashanahaps bringing in a mediator, a therapist, or a Rabbi, might make it easier. Please think about it - mipnei darchei shalom, for the sake of the ways of peace.

Attaining peace represents the highest of our Jewish aspirations because through our relationships we’re restored not only to those with whom we feel deeply bonded, but also ultimately to ourselves. In this season of turning, restoration and renewal, this is our purpose, our mission, our duty, and our goal. Whatever it takes to move us in that direction we should take it - mipnei darchei shalom, for the sake of peace.

This season of seeking t’shuvah is our time to begin.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Our Finest Hour: Yom Hazikaron
by Isaac Klein

[Classic Sermon]

At the beginning of the New Year, I want to greet you with the good wishes that are traditional at this time. "May you be inscribed in the Book of Life, and may your life be blessed with the good things that make it worthwhile and meaningful."

This holiday is best known by the name Rosh Hashanah, New Year—the beginning of the year, to be exact. It is also known by the name Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Remembrance, and Yom Teruah, the Day of the Blowing of the Shofar. Each name has special significance. Today we shall dwell on the name Yom Hazikaron, Day of Remembrance. This is the most used name in our prayers for the High Holy Days.

It is indeed a Day of Remembrance, because there are many things to remember. We pray to God: Remember us unto life. We declare how God remembers everything, the virtues of our ancestors as well as our own shortcomings, and pray that the remembrance of the virtues should predominate.

The other side of the coin is that we too have to remember. Ever since Freud we have known that even memory is not automatic, but can be manipulated. We remember the things we want to remember and forget the things we would like to forget. I would like to speak about the things that we should remember and will take my cue from a verse quoted in the Zichronot, "Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem, saying: Thus says the Lord: I remember the devotion of your youth, your love, as a bride; how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown" (Jeremiah 2:2).

Even people who may not understand their literal, meaning, can sense that this verse must have special significance. Notice that the cantor pays special attention to these words, because the music here becomes more eloquent.

God is speaking to the people of Israel as a lover would speak to his beloved. Look back to the early days of the youth of the Jewish people, when the children of Israel were in the desert and promised eternal love and loyalty to God. It was a desolate desert, but the devotion and love were so great that no difficulty and no hardship could matter. But now, years later, how do matters stand?

Imagine a husband and wife who have been married for years and are discovering that things are not as they used to be. They remember how at the beginning, when they were young, no sacrifice was great enough, no hardship could discourage them. Despite all obstacles, the world was theirs to conquer and enjoy. But now? Every little thing irritates them. Every molehill becomes a mountain, and the slightest obstacle halts them. Such a couple sits down, reminisces, and asks, "What has come between us? Could we recapture that old spirit, the love that brought us together? What has become of us?" And they reminisce about their happy moments. Sometimes these memories bring back the glow of their younger years.

On Rosh Hashanah we ought to do the same with ourselves as Jews, as Americans, as bearers of Western civilization. We too have to remember those episodes in our history of which we can say what Churchill said of Britain in 1940: "It was their finest hour." In every turn of our history when crisis faced the Jewish people and it was threatened with annihilation, it brought forth an institution which not only caused it to survive but also blessed the world.

When Israel was in Egypt and Pharaoh let our people go, and we went into the desert, there was the danger of us becoming just another Bedouin tribe that made its living on brigandage and constant warring with its neighbors. Instead, the silence of the desert was interrupted with thunder and lightning, and the Lord appeared on Mount Sinai and gave us the Ten Commandments, which became the foundation stone for future society. The world has never been the same since, because our moral laws have been the basis for every society that wished to call itself civilized. Ever since, Israel has been carrying this Torah for all mankind. This we should remember. It was our finest hour.

Judaism became a portable religion. The other peoples considered their religions as geographic. When you leave your native land, you accept the religion of the new country. Not so the Jews.

God is everywhere, they said. In their little meeting houses they kept alive the faith of their fathers. These meeting houses became the synagogues. Our synagogues later became the parent of the church and the mosque: We take it for granted that in every town and hamlet, wherever people are gathered, there is a place of worship. This is true only among those peoples whose religion sprang from Judaism. The synagogue has been a blessing to us and also to the world. It saved our lives. It was our finest hour when we established it.

When Rome threatened our extinction we created an institution which saved us and which proved a blessing to the whole world--the school. We petitioned the Roman authorities for permission to establish a school. The Romans granted the permission because the project seemed so insignificant. It was that school, however, that breathed a new life into the scattered remnants of a defeated and humiliated people, and laid the foundation for a continued productive and creative life. The school saved the Jewish people. It was our finest hour.

In our own day we walked in the valley of the shadow of death When people thought that our losses had crippled us permanently we revived anew like a phoenix from its ashes, establishing the State of Israel, astonishing the whole world with our vitality. The Jewish people was saved. Again with saving ourselves we helped the world, because Israel is a bulwark of democracy in an area of the world where governments are dictatorial and unstable. It again was our finest hour.

These are the things that I would urge you to remember. The history of a people is its biography, and biography is what we are. Unfortunately we often forget our finest hours.

A king’s son once sinned against his father. He expelled him from the palace, and the prince was taken in by kind peasants. Years passed and the prince became used to the way of the peasants. Once the king passed through that area. It was the custom that when the king arrived, the people who had a request wrote it on a slip of paper and presented it to the king.

This year the king’s son was among the petitioners, and the king waited with bated breath to see if his son still had royal taste. Alas, the prince had become a peasant. He wanted some straw for his roof, and no more.

He forgot that he ever was a prince.

Many of us, too, have forgotten that we were princes. We forget the glory of being a Jew. We forget even the taste of authentic Judaism. The flaming faith of our fathers, which made them overcome every crisis with creative triumph, fades into darkness and oblivion. And so we are satisfied with crumbs, with just a bit of straw for the roof. But what we really lack is closeness to God, awareness of our destiny, knowledge of the Torah, observance of the Mitzvot, recognition of the great and holy task which is Israel’s—that we have forgotten.

[Leaving us with a question to ponder in the coming days, "What can be our own finest hour in the year to come?"]

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

A Formula for the Future: Pursue Excellence
by Joel R. Schwartzman

[Submitted 2005]

Rosh Hashanah, coming as it does close to that infamous day, September 11th –9/11, gives us pause to think about our priorities for the coming year and for this Day of Remembrance. We have come to understand that we live in a world some of whose members hold values, goals, and intentions quite foreign to us Jews. Whereas we place the highest value on life, Islamic terrorists place a greater value on inflicting harm upon the Untied States and its citizens as well as on Jews and Israel, specifically, through the deaths of their own agents.

We applaud any and all attempts to keep our nation safe; that is: those which stay within the bounds of also protecting our liberties. For in the attempt to achieve perfection, we have come to discover that we can overdo it, creating threats to our freedoms that are as great as any terrorist can generate. Given our human condition, when we attempt to achieve perfection, we often set ourselves, our loved ones and friends up for failure.

Tomorrow I shall speak about one example of someone who tried to achieve what he perceived was the perfect service of God. Abraham failed in his attempt. Tonight, as we peer into the future, I want to dwell for a time on this difference between achieving perfection and arriving at excellence. For those who have that perfectionist trait, you understand that our standard is set through and by our own selves. Perfection is subjective. Perfection is also pernicious in that one who believes that he or she has achieved something perfect will most likely also carry with him or her contempt for like achievements of others. They may also resent what other people try to bring to the table. Given a standard of perfection, anything less than reaching “the perfect” is unacceptable. Those who do not attain are contemptible. Those who strive to be perfect introduce a level of stress into their lives which often becomes unhealthy to themselves and their loved ones.

In place of reaching for perfection, the better idea is to pursue excellence. Let us, then, not confuse the two. Whereas perfection is a standard derived and set by the individual, excellence is objective and is measurable.

There are three areas in which we could all pursue Jewish excellence. Tomorrow, the Un’tane Tokef prayer spells out this three fold lesson when it states: Ut’shuvah, U-tefillah U-tz’dakkah ma’avereen et roah ha-gezayrah. The first, then, comes in the realm of t’shuvah, repentance.

It is often in our nature to quarrel and disagree. Human beings lack the capacity to see all sides of life. We become invested in our beliefs. We become tied to our opinions. We often put our egos where our humility should be. Learning to become more excellent human beings involves being able to say that we have been wrong. It involves saying that we are sorry for the slights and the jabs, for the pig-headedness we have displayed in the past and for our unwillingness to bend and peRosh Hashanahaps see things a different way from the approach we normally have been using.

Our sages admonished us that those who arrive at these coming ten days filled with themselves and with an overabundance of pride will not engage in the benefits of what the Yameem Nora’eem can bring, a sense of forgiveness and renewal. It is impossible to have that sense when one cannot admit having done anything wrong, having said nothing insensitive, and not being able to admit that there, indeed, were other ways a collective task or problem could have been approached. “My way or the highway” is the antithesis of these holidays. It reveals one’s haughty sense of self perfection over a pursuit of becoming an excellent human being.

Teshuvah, at its heart, involves a self perception of one’s essential brokeness...and the never ending struggle we all go through to fit into this world, to have our thoughts and ideas be acceptable, to work cooperatively within a system even as we sacrifice a certain amount of our egos to do so, to recognize that none of us is perfect...that we’re all trying the best we can to make our way...that we all need to cut each other some slack. We live in the world? We learn to forgive! At the same time, we must make ourselves more forgivable.

The second ingredient, tefillah, involves the liturgical world, the world of prayer.

When I spoke about practicing and when I said that practice leads to better habits, this applies to what we do and say prayerfully. Other rabbis and clergy I have known or read, speak about strengthening our “prayer muscles.” Those are the ones we often neglect in our daily lives...such as saying the Motzee before each meal which contains bread.

Becoming more mindful of the role God plays in our lives and of the gifts we indeed have at hand is one way of becoming more thankful, more sensitive, more reflective servants of our Creator. Modern commentators point out that unused prayer muscles atrophy and cannot be counted on when we most need them. When we do fail, when disaster strikes and we call out for strength or help, those of us who know and understand the traditional Jewish pathways to God have got that habituated mode of support and solace, a life tested safety net upon which to fall back. And in the achievement of that humility of which I spoke with reference to forgiveness, prayer is a vital element so necessary to finding our place in this complex, sped up world.

How many of us legitimately use the Sabbath as brakes to our working week? How many of us light candles, claiming authority over fire, bless wine, asserting control over alcohol’s potential addictiveness, and sing a Motzee over bread, placing the proper emphasis on the role food plays in our lives...and dedicating it all to God who adjures us to observe Shabbat— to slow our lives down at the end of each week?

Then, too, comes the final concept— after teshuvah, repentance, Tefillah prayer — of Tzeddakah, of living righteously by sharing of ourselves and our material possessions in significant ways. If one is to establish the excellence of his or her being in this world, then Tzeddakah teaches us the pathways to do God’s work here on Earth. Would you seek excellence in your life? Then forget yourself and learn to serve others.

If we come to these holidays stressed out and sore in spirit, we can try reaching out to someone less fortunate than ourselves...bring our canned goods for the homeless, drop some coins and bills on a charity of our choice, volunteer to teach an illiterate person, put time in at a local cancer ward. Get more active. Become even more rounded people by sharing what we do and what we know.

Whereas pursuing perfection involves a narrowing of one’s perspective and a closing oneself off from life, trying to achieve betterment and excellence with the life that God has given you, involves a gestalt...a wholeness which involves weaving various pieces of living together: an attitude of humility derived from Teshuvah, repentance; gratitude and thankfulness learned from the world of Tefillah, prayer; and willingness to partake in selfless giving which comes through doing Tzeddakah.

One could do worse than to be humble, grateful and giving. One “gets there” and gets what these holidays are all about when they achieve humility, gratitude and altruism through a Divinely blessed and sanctioned quest for excellence.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Three Ingredients for a Happy New Year
by Toba August

[Rosh Hashanah – 5764]

Rosh Hashanah begins a ten day period which culminates on Yom Kippur. This ten-day period is referred to as “The High Holy Days”. In Hebrew they are called, “Ya’mim Nora’im” – meaning, the “Awe-filled” days. This time is taken very seriously by the Jewish people and is the beginning of the process of making amends, and of feeling the regret and remorse of missed opportunities in the year gone by.

I want to change this perception of the full ten days and separate the two days of Rosh Hashanah from the remaining days leading up to Yom Kippur. There is no mention today or tomorrow in any of our prayers about sin, or atonement. I am declaring that Rosh Hashanah is actually a time for joy and happiness. I have come to believe this and embrace this concept in my Yontif preparations.

Look around at our full sanctuary. This is a significant time for the Jewish people. We are acutely aware of the effort it took to get us here. There was much logistical planning by so many people, and there was the spiritual preparation that we have done during the month of Elul. And we cannot forget the cards we sent, the calls we made, the family arrangements for meals, and last but not least, figuring out the outfits we would wear to synagogue. This is all serious work.

Without discounting any of the above, I am stating today that Rosh Hashanah is not so serious. In fact, I repeat what I said a few moments ago, I am declaring, loudly and clearly that Rosh Hashanah is a time for joy and happiness!

How can I say this? Let’s begin by looking at one of my favorite Rosh Hashanah prayers, chanted during the Shofar blowing in the Musaf service:

“Hayom Harat Olam”--Today is the birthday of the world! Today the world was called into being.
“Hayom”-- today. - “Tvarchaynu”…bless us!

Today- hayom-“tekabeil B’ra’cha’mim et tifiylataynu” - today accept our prayers with love…today inscribe us for a good life…

Rosh Hashanah - today- right now, is the birthday of the world. We celebrate and recognize our belief in creation, rebirth, and renewal.

What is it about creation and about birthdays? When we celebrate our birthdays, we celebrate our creation. As we age, birthdays are more problematic for some, but spiritually we know - each year can be a new creation. We can “ re-create” on some levels, ourselves. We can “re-create” something already in existence. Today we exclaim in our liturgy, that we can “re-create” our world. We have this opportunity. This chance, now, today and this makes me happy.

Most holidays are connected to a historical event. Passover tells the Exodus from Egypt, Shavuot is the giving of the Ten Commandments, but what is the historical connection for Rosh Hashanah?

The answer is “Heilgeshichte” a scholarly term referring to our “religious” history. Rosh Hashanah is connected to the time of Creation. But according to our Midrash, it was not the beginning of creation itself. Rather, Rosh Hashanah is the 6th day, the day that Human Beings were created. We are celebrating God’s creation of ourselves as human beings.

Rosh Hashanah celebrates then, not just the birthing of the world, but literally, according to our tradition, the “birth” day of humankind. Creation began on the 25th of Elul. Elul has 29 days. The sixth day of creation is today, Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the month of Tishrei. Adam and Eve were created today. And what happened in just one day? Our Midrash teaches us:

“Adam was created and in a period of 12 hours went thru an entire spiritual journey. Created in the first hour of the sixth day, he sinned in the tenth hour of the same day and was judged in the eleventh hour, and pardoned in the twelfth hour. God then assured Adam and Eve that in the future, when their descendants stand in judgment before the Holy One on Rosh Hashanah, they, like the first human, would obtain a full pardon.” (Midrash Leviticus Rabbah 29:1)

This is the text that underscores and enhances our Rosh Hashanah prayers. We say, “Hayom Harat Olam” – today the world has come into being. And what we are really alluding to is a veritable model on how to live our lives. We are taught that built into the fabric of creation itself, is forgiveness, pardon and a second chance! We have a fresh start! This makes me so happy!

An angry reader once stormed into a newspaper office waving the day’s paper, asking to see the editor of the obituary column. He showed him his name in the obituary listing. “You see,” he said, “ I am very much alive. I demand a retraction!”

The reporter replied, “ I never retract a story. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do; I’ll put you in the birth column and give you a fresh start!”

In the fabric of creation itself and built into the structure of Rosh Hashanah, is “guaranteed forgiveness." We know that if we make the effort with true sincerity and with all our hearts and minds, we are already forgiven. This time, the beginning of the Yamim Noraim, the Awe-filled days - this time,

Rosh Hashanah is a time to embrace unconditional love. Just as a parent has unconditional love for a child no matter what that child does, so too God accepts us unconditionally, and so too we can accept ourselves.

We show up, do the work, reflect on and participate in prayer and in asking for Teshuvah. And after the process we know we can begin a new year with a clean slate. We know, unconditionally, that we are loved, given a second chance, and are forgiven.

We can re-create our selves. We can re- evaluate our priorities. We can re-formulate and restructure the purpose and meaning of our lives.

This is surely a time for great joy and happiness.

If this is the true nature of Rosh Hashanah, in what ways can we acknowledge and celebrate happiness? How can we truly be happy? What are the ingredients that make people feel a true contentment of spirit?

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin quotes his late mother Helen in his book Uncommon Sense who said: “The only people I know who are happy are people I don’t know well,” impling that even when we think someone is happy, all we have to do is scratch the surface, and there is much we are unaware of, lurking beneath the outside façade.

In the United States Declaration of Independence, we declare that we have inalienable rights for “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

Since we know we are going to be forgiven, and today is a joyous Yontif, let’s reflect. What were some of the happiest moments of your life? Breathe…relax… what do you recall? Where were you…what was happening? Who was involved? Feel, see, hear, smell what was happening… take a moment…what do your happiest moments have in common?

Too often when asked what would make them happy, individuals respond on a superficial level saying money, physical pleasure and more processions would make them happy. There have been studies done and experts agree that money does not buy happiness.

What else does not make us happy? Seeking pleasure will not make us happy, because it does not last. One therapist writes that a wealthy patient after a gourmet meal craves cognac. After the cognac, a cigarette, after the cigarette, he will want to make love. After making love, another cigarette… His search for happiness thru pleasures of the senses seemed to have no end. And he was not happy.” True happiness is not self-centered, or self-indulgent. It is not about seeking sensual pleasures.

If happiness is a theme of Rosh Hashanah and is necessary for us to fulfill our destinies, then we need to have a deeper, more complex and profound understanding of happiness.

Rabbi Zusya lived in abject poverty in the 1st century CE. Someone who saw his tattered clothes and torn shoes asked him, “How can you recite the daily beracha, “blessed are You, O God, who has given me all my needs,” when you are so grossly lacking even the basic amenities?

R. Zusya replied, “God knows what my needs are better than I do.

If God has determined that one of my needs is poverty, I am happy to accept God’s judgment.”

The first ingredient for Happiness is to develop an “attitude of gratitude.”

I am grateful dear God, for waking up. We can continue and say out loud what you are grateful for. We can also continue to take an inventory, keep a journal, detailing what specifically we are grateful for during the day. Happiness, we are told is a habit we must cultivate. We begin by being grateful, everyday, for what we have, and strive to be content with our portion.

Who is rich? One who is content with their portion.

Rabbi Abraham Twerski, who is also a noted Psychiatrist and author, in his book on Spirituality received the following lesson on gratitude from one of his patients, He tells this story:

“[Rabbi Abraham Twerski] had just acquired a new automobile, with air-conditioning, full power, and cruise control. He was disappointed to find that the cruise control was faulty, and that it would deviate from the speed at which I set it. In order to get it to function properly, he would have to take the car back to the dealer, and this was a major inconvenience. He grumbled as he drove to the office that day.

The first patient he saw was a woman who was recovering from alcoholism and was now 10 months sober. She was euphoric about her sobriety and about her accomplishments. She had found a job, albeit at minimum wage, and since her child entered first grade and was at school all day, she was able to work enough hours to afford a better apartment.

In a few months she would be able to save enough to have her car repaired. “What is wrong with your car?” he asked.

“It has no reverse gear,” she answered.

“How can you drive without a reverse?” he asked.

“Well, you just have to think ahead. You have to park so that you don’t have to back up to get out. But I have to remember that there are some people who don’t have a car at all,” she said.

The second idea and ingredient to happiness is to know that happiness is a state of mind and is not determined by outside events. We can “change our thoughts” and teach ourselves to be more optimistic, compassionate, and kind. There has been much research recently on the brain. Studies have shown us that the systematic training of the mind can cultivate true happiness. This entails a genuine inner transformation by deliberately focusing on positive mental states and challenging the negative.

Happiness is a state of mind. We can choose happiness with wisdom.

Our third ingredient to happiness is forgiveness. Studies have shown a significant correlation between forgiveness and cultivating deep happiness. We need friends and community. Finding ways to forgive and move on allows us to stay loyal and connected to others we truly care about. In the spirit of Yontif, with the 10 days approaching, let us all make an effort to find forgiveness for one another in our hearts.

I do believe in “Hahsgafat Perateet” – the God is personally concerned with me and involved in my life.

I know that I do not have the full picture of my own life and that much is in God’s world, unknown to me. My happiness comes from my own concerted efforts at developing gratitude, mindfulness of others and the world around me. I have to adjust my state of mind daily, changing my thoughts and being mindful of the reactions and emotions, which constantly assault my being. I know also, that I could not survive without forgiveness. And I know I enrich my life with prayer and meditation.

Today I shared three main ingredients to creating happiness in everyday moments. These are three things we can all do everyday!

First, cultivate an “attitude of gratitude.” Second, know that we can change our state of mind and our thoughts, and third, invite forgiveness into our hearts.

This message that I have shared with you today, on Rosh Hashanah, has transformed my life. With God’s help, may these ideas inform your lives as well.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Living in Three Dimensions
by Hillel Silverman

In the midst of a world of confusion and uncertainty, Rosh Hashanah comes as a promising interlude between past and future. It is refreshing to take a break from the old routine. It is vital that, at least once a year, we put aside business problems, politics, sports, even the world crisis, to consider the real meaning and value of life.

On the day which marks the beginning of a New Year, when we pray again and again: “O God, remember us unto life,” should we not ask ourselves: “What is it that we really want out of life for which we so fervently pray?”

If in the past year we have been too busy to take into account the brevity of life, Rosh Hashanah comes again to re-mind us of it. “We are like the flower that fades, the wind that blows, the dream that vanishes.” If life is so short and fleeting, how shall we make worthwhile those few precious years?

Our psalmist has given us the answer: “Teach us to count our days aright that we may get us a heart of wisdom.”

On Rosh Hashanah, each of us is one year older than he was, but have we acquired the heart of wisdom which the psalmist has prescribed? Have we learned to enrich our lives so that we may more fully live our allotted span?

How tragic it is that so many people live primarily in the past. It is harmless to reminisce over the past so long as we see it in perspective, are not disgruntled with the present, and still retain hope for the future. But to constantly find fault with the way things are now, and continually to yearn for “the good old days” gone by—that is living in only one dimension.

There are those who live only in and for the present. For them past means nothing, and they are not concerned about the promise of the future. Their philosophy is not new but really ancient. Centuries ago, the prophet Isaiah condemned those who advised: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” How well we know that after a while pleasures become stale and boring, and leave a taste of gravel in the mouth. The pleasures of youth do not appeal to those of middle age.

Those who live only in the present, day after day, crowding in all the pleasures of life, pampering their flesh, pursuing new thrills, indulging every whim and desire, rush aimlessly through life like a dog chasing his own tail. Such living in the present is mere escapism. They are running away from something, and running away from themselves, but has it not been often enough demonstrated that we cannot run away from ourselves?

Then there are those who live only for the future and in the future. How often have we told ourselves: “Someday I’ll read those books. Someday I’ll take that trip. Someday I’ll visit Israel. Someday I’ll ease up on the grind. Someday I’ll devote time to this institution. Someday I’ll study the Bible and start coming faithfully to the synagogue on Friday nights and Sabbath mornings.”

We are always postponing the thing we would like to do. Ages ago, our sages warned us: “Do not say, `When I have leisure, I will study.’ You may never have the leisure.”

The same admonition applies to all our plans for the future. We keep on "saving for a rainy day” and ceaselessly striving to accumulate sufficient reserves to insure our future security. “We have no time” to do things we have always wanted to do. Suddenly we become too old and infirm to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Life—alas, we learn too late!—is in the living of it now.

Our tragedy consists of living in only a single dimension—past, present, or future. We hear so much these days about the three dimensions of space. In the New Year, our prayers emphasize the three dimensions of time. Again and again we recite on Rosh Hashanah: “God has reigned, God does reign, God will reign.” If we rearrange the four Hebrew letters for the name of God—yod, hay, vav, hay—we get ha-ya, “He was,” the past tense; ho-ve, “He is,” the present tense; yihye, “He will be,” the future tense.

Like God, man must live simultaneously in all three dimensions.

A new year is dawning. The future is veiled in uncertainty. Only God knows what He has in store for us. But of one thing we may be sure: our lives will be fuller, richer, and deeper in meaning if we learn to live and think in all three dimensions; if we choose the best of the past, live wisely in the present, and plan and build for a brighter future.

As we face the New Year, may we heed the admonition of the psalmist—to make every day count, so that our past memories shall be precious, our present satisfying, and our future full of promise.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Potential Choices for the Season
by Martin Levy

[2005]

We are in Elul, a month of changes, a month of preparation. This is a time of heightened spiritual awareness. Many things are possible during these days:
* We can do better!
* We can show more kindness!
* We can write a new page in our relationships!

This process of transformation that leads into the New Year is a serious one and requires real work. One key part of that process is called “teshuvah”; repentance, or turning.

T’shuvah involves forgiveness. Forgiveness is at the core of teshuvah because it is one aspect of the result, or change, we need to experience. T’shuvah is the process in our tradition that allows us to change. The Rabbis taught that teshuvah was put into the world even before the physical world was created. God knew we are imperfect, but God also knew that in our imperfection we have a spiritual self which can grow and change. Change is a big part of the Torah. It is part of God’s plan of creation. So teshuvah doesn’t just show up during this month of reconciliation. Rather, we must become more spiritually, attuned to this process as we approach the Days of Awe.

Some people say it’s too hard. My habits are there; I really can’t change. I am isolated; I’m despairing of friendship. Things will never be different for me. Judaism says: we all change. We all possess the power and insight to do teshuvah and to allow changes to strengthen our lives.

These are the simple steps to teshuvah:
* recognizing our wrongs,
* crying out to God,
* offering prayers and tzedakah,
* talking to God, and resolving to make a serious promise to follow a new path.

To me it’s a bit like taking a bath!! Or like going to a “mikveh”. You strip down. There’s no make-up, you thoroughly cleanse yourself before entering the mikveh. You say prayers. But there’s a problem: some people carry “old stuff’ (“sheretzim”) in their hands.

Now we can all begin ourselves. It’s part of the spiritual inventory needed: a “check-up” for every Soul. Just as we work with coaches, trainers and teachers; too in Elul we do a spiritual inventory.

What about the bigger community: the world? There are horrible things perpetuated against countries, ethnic groups, and religious groups. Can teshuvah be brought to bear upon these horrible actions??

Teshuvah is more than just forgiveness. Teshuvah must be proactive and transformative. Let me share a story with you:

In the mid-1960’s, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was once asked by a businessman, “Don’t you think it’s about time you and the Jewish people forgave the rest of the world for the Holocaust?”

Rabbi Heschel responded with this story:

At the turn of the century, Hayyim Soloveitchik, the rabbi of the Eastern European city of Brisk, a scholar of extraordinary renown, revered also for his gentleness, took a train in Warsaw to return home. The rabbi’s slight appearance did not betray his greatness. He found a seat in a compartment surrounded by traveling salesmen who started to play cards. The rabbi sat there reading but his disinterest in the game annoyed the card players one of whom suggested that he join in. He politely declined saying that he never played cards. The salesman increasingly badgered the rabbi and finally threatened him. “Either join us or leave.”

With that he picked up the rabbi by the collar and threw him out of the compartment. When the rabbi and the salesman got off at Brisk the rabbi was surrounded by his admirers, and the salesman discovered the rabbi’s true identity. His heart sank and he went over to the rabbi to ask for forgiveness.

“I would like to forgive you, but I can’t,” he said.

In the hotel, the salesman could find no peace and went to the rabbi’s house and offered to give all his savings to charity if only the rabbi would forgive him.

“No!” said the rabbi.

The salesman went to the synagogue to ask some of the worshipers how their rabbi, such a gentle person, could be so unforgiving. They suggested that he speak with the rabbi’s eldest son who agreed to discuss the matter with his father. And with trepidation he did so.

The rabbi of Brisk answered his son quite directly: “How can I forgive him? He never insulted me. He did not know who I was. Had he had any idea, he would never have acted as he did. He wants forgiveness? Let him go find a poor anonymous Jew sitting on a train reading a book and ask him for forgiveness!”

Rabbi Heschel concluded, “No one can forgive crimes committed against someone else. It is therefore preposterous to assume that any Jew alive can grant forgiveness for the suffering of any one of the six million Jews who perished.”

“According to Jewish tradition, even God Himself can only forgive sins committed against Himself, not against a human being.” The real power of forgiveness is not “I’m sorry” but that the process brings about a transformation.

Although the message for this the holiest day of the year is a simple one, finding a way to redress a wrong we may have committed is much more complicated. Nevertheless, the purpose of this sacred holy day is to afford us another opportunity, a second chance to be different in this New Year.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Let's Take a Look at Ourselves
by Abram Vossen Goodman

Today as we approach Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur, it is a good, but - may I add? - unconventional policy to look at ourselves. We are modern Jews who practice a surface religion. We are sophisticates who prize the appearance of things rather than their inward quality. Less concerned with our good deeds than with our golf scores, we are more aware of the style of our cars than the state of our souls.

Can we pour out our hearts to God? We are not even prepared to catalogue our shortcomings in the privacy of our own spirits. Confession of guilt is too naive a practice for consideration unless we relax on the psychoanalyst’s couch and share our innermost selves with him - but not with God.

They ordered things otherwise in the olden days. Then men approached the Days of Awe with fear and trembling. The last week of the old year was given over to midnight vigils of prayer and self-searching. Everyone was awakened by the knocking of the shammos and made his way to the synagogue in the dead of night for Selichos (translate) in the hope that God might soften His judgment as to who should live and who should die.

The length of our lives may be in God’s hands; their form is in our own. Life is more than a prize; it is a trust. To live wisely is to husband our talents and to employ them in the realization of hopes and dreams not for ourselves alone, but for others. Our supply of life is limited. Let us not waste it.

A young woman came to me recently with the complaint that she felt cheated in her existence. Life had not been generous to her. She had her social calendar filled, it seemed, but the young men with whom she made dates were empty of ideas and boring. “Don’t I deserve something better?” she moaned. The heart of the question was not what the world owed her, but what she owed the world. She expected so much from others, but it never occurred to her that she was giving nothing of her talents and of her spirit to those about her.

As we face the Holy Days, we ought to consider not what we may expect of God, but what God has a right to expect of us. We are like our first ancestor Adam who sought to hide from the Lord instead of giving Him the full measure of his service. Just as God spoke to Man in the garden, He calls at the Holy Day season: “Man, where art thou?” What may we answer in God’s presence? What can we ask for? What are we prepared to give?

It is not enough to say that man is a pitifully small mite in a vast, expanding universe. It is no answer to argue that this ‘generation of Jews is crass and indifferent and unworthy. Study Jewish history; analyze the denunciations of Moses and the prophets; ask yourselves if there was ever a generation of Jews that was worthy of being the vessels of God’s truth or the messengers of righteousness and brotherhood to mankind.

When Isaiah proclaimed that Israel was God’s servant, His elect who was to serve as a light of the nations, he was still disturbed by the complacency and the downright indifference of the people in the face of a divine call. “Who is blind,” he asked, “but My servant? Or deaf as My messenger that I send?” If the greatest prophet of antiquity could almost lose faith in his people, perhaps we may be pardoned for some of the lack of confidence we have in ourselves.

That does not mean that we have a right to dodge our obligations. We latter day Jews still consider ourselves bound by an ancient convenat to God to he His messengers to mankind. We chose God long ago, and we cannot escape from duties and obligations that have descended from generation to generation through the centuries. There are no alternatives. We too have been called to God’s service.

Each of us should come before God at our annual rendezvous with a sense of dissatisfaction. We need not complain of God’s ways which are beyond our understanding. We should instead search our own hearts and ask wherein we have failed to realize all our qualities for friendship and for service, how pitifully we have tended the gardens entrusted to our care.

The world, we are told, was brought into being on Rosh Hashonah, but the act of creation is still unfinished. God is in need of man, His partner, to complete the task. Don’t hold back and apologize about our inadequacy and our limitations. Only through man’s efforts may God’s Kingdom on earth be completed.

Do not hold back as God’s elect who is blind and deaf. See that the task of regeneration rests only on you. When God calls from His throne and asks: “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?,” answer in the words of the prophet, “Here am I; send me.”

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

The Power of Changing
by Paul Plotkin

I want to tell you a simple story by an unknown author. It’s the story about a quiet man named Carl.

Carl was 75 years old and had lived in the same neighborhood for over 50 years. It had once been a nice neighborhood, but now it was full of random violence, gangs, and drug activity.

The synagogue advertised for volunteers to take care of the gardens behind the Rabbi’s house. Carl signed up for the job. But then an event occurred that would have crushed many people.

Carl was finishing watering the garden one day when three gang members showed up. He ignored their intimidation and just asked if they would like a drink of water from the hose. The biggest and meanest answered, "Yeah, sure."

The other two grabbed Carl and threw him down. They took Carl’s watch and wallet. Carl tried to get up, but he had fallen on his bad leg. He was trying to get up when the Rabbi came running to help. The Rabbi kept asking Carl if he was okay or if he was hurt, as he helped him to his feet.

Carl sighed and shook his head. "It was just some punk kids. Maybe they’ll wise up someday." He bent and picked up the hose, adjusted the nozzle and started watering again. The rabbi was confused and concerned as he asked Carl what he was doing. "I need to finish watering the garden. It’s been very dry lately," .

A few weeks later the gang members returned, and just like the first time, Carl offered them a drink from the hose. They didn’t rob him this time. Instead, they wrenched the hose away from Carl and soaked him from head to foot in icy water. When they had finished humiliating him, they sauntered off down the street, yelling insults and curses over their shoulders and falling over each other at the hilarity of what they had done.

Carl just watched them. He turned his face toward the warm sun, calmly picked up his garden hose, and went back to watering the garden.

Summer was quickly turning into fall. Carl was tilling one day when he heard someone come up behind him. He stumbled and fell into some evergreen branches. He struggled to regain his footing, and turned to see the gang leader holding out his hand. Carl braced himself for an attack.

"Don’t worry, old man," said the gang leader, "I won’t hurt you." The young man spoke softly, still holding out his tattooed and scarred hand to Carl. He helped Carl get up, and pulled a crumpled bag from his pocket.

"What’s this?" Carl asked.

"It’s your stuff," the boy answered. "I brought your stuff back. It’s all here, even the money that was in your wallet."

"Why would you help me now?" Carl asked.

The boy shuffled his feet, looking embarrassed and uncomfortable. "Because I learned something from you," he said. "We picked on you because you were old. We knew we could get away with it. But every time we came, instead of yelling and fighting back, you just tried to give us a drink of water. You didn’t hate us back because we hated you. You just kept showing us love."

He stopped for a minute and then went on. "I couldn’t sleep after we stole your stuff, so I decided to bring it back." He paused for another awkward moment, not knowing how to proceed. "I guess this is my way of thanking you for straightening me out." With that, he walked away.

Carl carefully opened the bag in his hands. He put his watch back on his arm. When he opened his wallet, he checked for his wedding photo, and gazed lovingly at the young bride smiling back at him.

Carl died one day that Fall right after Yom Kippur. In spite of the weather, his funeral was well attended. The Rabbi noticed a tall young man sitting quietly in a far corner of the church. The Rabbi spoke of Carl’s garden. "Do your best," he said, "and make your garden as beautiful as you can. We will never forget Carl and his garden."

The following spring another flyer went out asking for a volunteer to work in the garden. It read: "Someone needed to care for Carl’s garden." One day the Rabbi heard a knock at his office door. When he opened the door, he saw a pair of scarred and tattooed hands holding the flyer. "I believe this is my job, if you’ll have me," the young man said.

The Rabbi recognized him as the same boy who had returned Carl’s watch and wallet. He knew that Carl’s kindness had turned this boy’s life around. The minister just handed him the keys and said, "Yes, go take care of Carl’s garden and honor him." The young man went to work without a word.

Over the next several years, this young man tended the garden just the way Carl had. During that time, he went to college, got married, and became a prominent member in the community. But he never forgot the promise he had made to honor Carl’s memory. He kept the garden as beautiful as he could, and thought that Carl would have approved.

One day he approached the new Rabbi and explained that he could no longer take care of the garden. He said with a shy and happy smile, "My wife had a baby boy last night, and she’s bringing him home on Monday."

"Mazel Tov!" said the Rabbi, as he took the keys to the garden shed. "That’s wonderful! What’s the baby’s name?"

"Carl," replied the former gang member.

What happened to that young gang member is what I want to talk about today.

This story is a quintessential example of what we call "Tshuvah," sometimes translated as "repentance," or "return." I would like to look at it as "change."

It is, I would argue, the obligation of each and every one of us to be constantly becoming someone else, someone better. In life, we must constantly be growing. And in order to grow, we need to change. Because if we don’t grow, we decline.

There is no such thing as staying the same, because everything else is in motion. Everything else is moving. If you stay the same, you fall behind. If you don’t advance, you decline. If you don’t grow and change, you atrophy and die, even if you’re still breathing.

We all need to change, and as Jews especially, we need to change; that’s why we have asaret yemei teshuva, the ten days of repentance, of change. They begin today with Rosh Hashanah, and climax with Yom Kippur. Every year we go through this process of introspection, of evaluation and hopefully, of change.

This coming year I need to change! I need to grow! Because if I don’t grow, my year won’t continue to improve. My life will not continue to give me satisfaction and opportunity. It will retreat. It will degenerate. It will decline.

Last spring, I was driving to another county to officiate at a wedding. I was in the car with my wife. We saw a billboard that caught our eyes. It said something to the effect of "Keep Our County Growing."

We both looked and commented on the billboard. What that could possibly mean. How could our county grow?

It’s all grown out. There’s virtually no new land. What is habitable and able to be developed and lived in, worked on, or turned into recreation, has already been done, and probably has been so, for a while.

As we continued to drive, we crossed the County Line approaching the synagogue. This was my wife's home turf. She said, "That’s where my mom used to go. That’s where the Food Fair we shopped at, used to be."

And then it hit us both: That’s how our County continues to grow. Buildings are torn down, or re-configured for new purposes. Old buildings are replaced with new; low-rise with high-rise; dilapidated with modern.

Areas filled with elderly Jews are replaced with young Latinos, or with trendy gays, or with the smart set from all over the world.

You grow, when you change.

So how do I propose that we change? I want to give you three areas, by way of suggestion, that you might want to consider to change for next year.

1. Regardless of how you prioritized your life in the past, make your family number one.

At risk of sounding like a cliche, when it’s all over, what will matter most? Too many people spend the bulk of their life in pursuit of career, of material acquisition, of getting ahead, of finding status, of getting more, of living bigger.

If you took all of the enjoyable moments of your life that came from a material or professional accomplishment, and you put them onto one side of a balancing scale; and on the other you took the morning of your son or daughter’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah; or walking your daughter or son down the aisle to be married under the chuppah, is there any question which side would be tipped?

And if you took all your material accomplishments on one side, and the other side starting with the moment of birth, the Bris, or the baby naming, Bar or Bat Mitzvah, the Confirmation, the wedding, the graduations, the Little League baseball games, the great report from the teachers at Parent Teacher night; which side would outweigh the other?

The first change that I am advocating is a change in your priorities that affect your time. I’m not saying, don’t become successful. I’m not saying, don’t work hard. I’m saying, don’t do them at the risk, at the sacrifice, of your family. Your children will be with you for only so long, and later on you’ll realize how short that period was.

In an age in which marriages are so tenuous, you don’t have a number of years to ignore your spouse. It’s too hard to make it up later, partly because lost years are lost, and partly because few people are willing to wait. They, too, will move on in their lives. And then both of you will be that much less then what you could have been.

A few years ago, Tom Bloch resigned as Chief Executive Officer of H&R Bloch. Then it was a $1.7 billion tax preparation and services firm. Tom left behind this prestigious and, needless to say, high-paying job to become a teacher at St. Francis Xavier Middle School in Kansas City, MO. His annual salary dropped suddenly to less than $15,000 per year, about 3% of his old salary.

But Bloch knew his hectic schedule as CEO had been interfering with his top priority: his wife and their two sons. Bloch said,

"The hardest part was telling my father," referring to H&R Bloch chairman Henry Bloch, who co-founded the company in 1955.

"But," Bloch continued, "I didn’t want to look back on my life and say, "Gee, I had an opportunity to play a bigger part in my children’s lives, and I didn’t take it."

The second change that I would strongly urge you to consider is to make yourself much less important. ........ We have raised individualism in our society to the point of idolatry.

We now, more often than not, do not come to the synagogue to worship, because we’re too busy praying at the temple of our own god. We now look to the mirror to see the reflection of the divine, and I don’t mean as in " we were created in the image of God." We have been raised to believe that we can choose how and what we want, because we want to; because no one can tell us what to do! Because the individual is über alles.

This is not a Jewish trait; this is an American trait. We are just practicing it, like all good Americans.

There are no authorities any more. We have no respect for anyone. Why should we do communal service? Why should we limit our personal joy, our personal expression, for the sake of anything, or anyone else?

In the past, and I’m not saying everything about the past was nostalgically perfect, but in the past, we were part of a community. We did things sometimes because it was the right thing to do. We did things sometimes not because they were convenient or good for us, but because they were good for everyone else.

We understood that we were all intertwined. What we did had an impact not just on ourselves, but on everyone else, and what everyone else did had an impact on us, and therefore we were concerned about the implications of our behavior on others, far more than our own personal pleasures.

Today its all about what I want. What makes me happy. What can I take out of a situation, a relationship, a friendship, a shul membership, or Judaism for that matter?

Everyone wants what they want when they want it, and how they want it, with no rules, no obligations, and no responsibility.

The Ten Commandments have been all over the news lately. There’s a punchline to an old joke that ends, with "if we could pick and choose, they would have been called the ten suggestions."

And finally, the third change that I would recommend that we make: We need to re-connect with religious, Judaism. I am convinced, more now than ever, that the only Jews who will survive the next hundred years, will be those who are, at some level, practicing the religion.

Nothing else will survive the onslaught of assimilation; the seduction of secularism; the opportunity to simply blend at every level into a nondescript, American entity where the Jewish part becomes irrelevant.

Many people in this room will not have Jewish grandchildren or great-grandchildren, because even when two Jewish people marry each other, if there is not a religious component, very often there is no lasting Jewish component. They just happen to be Jewish people, but there’s nothing about the upbringing that their children will receive, that will define them as Jews.

The places that we do our serious Jewish things, are in the home and in the shul--not on the golf course--not in the mall, and not in the gymnasium. This may come as a shock, but the mall, the golf course, and the gymnasium are not exclusively and only open on Saturday morning. They are still there other times and other days of the week.

But there’s only one opportunity to light candles, to have challah, to have wine, and to say, "Good Shabbos," and that’s Friday night. There’s only one major time to gather conveniently during the week with your brothers and sisters to hear words of Torah and to worship your God, and that’s Saturday morning.

And if it doesn’t work for you, because you don’t feel anything, then in all humility, I can only beg you, try harder.

Some say they don’t come because it’s overwhelming? They don’t know or understand anything? I no longer buy that excuse.

On a visit to a kibbutz, a man who had been there for 35 years spoke to Ben Gurion in Yiddish. Ben Gurion said to him, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Why don’t you learn Hebrew?"

The man replied, "It’s easier to be ashamed, than it is to study Hebrew."

And that is the way it is for so many of us, at least until now.

It is easier to cast off the yoke of Torah, to ignore its discipline, and its practice; than to learn the language, to learn the practice, the ways and the means of a time-tested religion that is our inheritance and our blessing.

This past year has been a bumper crop, for whatever reason, for me and converts. I have converted a slew of people this year. Let me tell you what I’ve learned from them, amongst other things.

The Saturday morning service is not as challenging as you’ve claimed it to be. They come, not only not knowing Hebrew; they don’t know anything about Judaism.

Within two or three months, they can come Saturday and find it doable, because they learned by rote some of the key prayers, and melodies. They read the English, they absorb, and they practice. They are open to the service, and so the service is open to them.

Many of you have, at some point in your years in the shul, been either more involved in services than you are now, some have gone the other way. Some have never started.

For the first and last group, please come. Please find the space, and the time, and make a change. The more you invest in, the more you will receive back.

On the High Holidays, on the days of Teshuva, of change, more than at any other time, God whispers to our soul, and speaks to our heart.

I pray with all my heart that we will listen today to the whisper, and do Teshuva, make the changes.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

The Measure of Our Success   [Not edited]
by Harold S. Kushner

[The American Rabbi, 17/1]

When I was younger, I used to think that Tolstoy had said something very profound in the opening line of his novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are unhappy each in its own way." I don’t think so any more. I think he got it wrong. If I were to ask you what keeps you from being totally happy, there are only a limited number of things you would come up with: problems of health, problems about money, problems within the family. There are only so many ways of being aggravated. But if I were to ask you what would make you happy, that’s where we would find out how many different individual prescriptions for happiness people have.

I suggested a, few years ago that each of us really writes his or her own prayerbook for Rosh HaShanah. The liturgy, the traditional prayers that we chant and read, are a kind of background music for the personal prayers we’re composing inside our heads this morning. And what are those personal prayers? I don’t have to be a mind reader to guess. A prayer for life and health for us and our families, that we be safe from all the unpredictable ravages of the world and we all be here next year to see another New Year in. For most of us, that would be first. Next, perhaps a prayer for peace - in Israel, in the world, and in our own homes, husbands and wives, parents and children, And then if we can permit ourselves to be honest in our prayers, to put into words what we think about without embarrassment, a prayer for success, for prosperity, that it he a good year for us.

We don’t have to be ashamed to offer that prayer. Long before there was Reaganomics, Jews prayed for a year of prosperity, a year of parnassah, of abundant harvests, of making an adequate living. But a prayer for a successful year, a year of prosperity, ought to be more than a prayer for a good job. When we pray for life, for health, we know what we’re talking about. We have a mental picture of what it would look and feel like to get what we pray for. But when we pray for success, and prosperity, what do we have in mind? I’m not sure it’s clear. This is where I think Tolstoy was wrong. It’s the unhappy families who tend to be similar. We all know what sickness, fear, conflict, feel like. But what does happiness feel like? What is success? Fulfillment? I think that’s where we find out how different we all are. There is a definition of success which American culture has put forth, which I think q lot of us have bought, and that’s too bad, because I think it’s a particularly destructive one. American society says that to be successful means to be attractive and productive. Success means looking good and making money.

Women were taught from their childhood on that a woman’s role in life is to be looked at, to be passive while other people evaluate your appearance. Success means being attractive enough to find the right kind of husband who will then take care of you. You don’t get to be Miss America by writing a poem, earning a Ph.D., or helping a lot of people. You become Miss America, by being stared at. And the ads on television, which can’t afford to be based on wishful thinking, will still be geared to helping women feel more attractive, more desirable, not more competent.

Women are taught that the way to be successful is to be attractive. Would it shock you, as it shocked me recently, to be told, that as many as one out of every ten female college students suffers from a psychological eating problem, - anorexia, not eating to the point of starvation, or bulimia, eating and then throwing up, in order to lose weight? That well-known authority on life and morals, the Duchess of Windsor, once said, "There is no such thing as being too rich or, too thin," and for some reason, college students believe her. Now psychiatrists differ on their understanding of anorexia. Some say it’s an over-commitment to the goal of being slim and attractive; others say it’s a rejection of the body, a rejection of the notion that your figure and your appearance define who you are. But it virtually only happens to adolescent women, and it represents an extreme form of the price we pay in mental and physical illness and unhappiness when we define success in terms of physical appearance.

Our society it’s much kinder to men either. For men, we define success in winning, coming out ahead of others in the competition for fame and fortune, whatever you have to do to get there. The most blatant examples, perhaps, are the college football and basketball coaches who pass on to the 19-year-olds in their charge the wisdom that if you can’t win within the rules, break the rules because nothing is more important than winning. But this definition of success as outdoing others and earning more money, is a lot more pervasive than that. I’ve done a lot of traveling this year; I’ve spoken in several dozen synagogues.

In one town where I went to speak, the rabbi picked me up at the airport, and as soon as we were seated in his car, he began to say to me, "You’re active in the Rabbinical Assembly. Tell me, who’s in line for that big pulpit in Atlanta? Is it true that Rabbi So-and-so is retiring next year? What do you know about the congregation in (a certain community) that’s looking for a rabbi?"

I said to him, "You must be very eager to leave this place."

He told me, "Actually, I like it here. It’s a wonderful community, I like the people, my family is happy, my kids are in good schools, I think I’m doing an effective job. You know what the only problem is? When I go to the Rabbis’ convention and I see former classmates of mine, and they ask me, 'Where are you now, How many families?,' I forget how much I like the people here and I feel like a failure for being stuck in a small shul in a small town."

If this definition of success as producing more and earning more than other people in your field has even contaminated the rabbinate, you can imagine how pernicious it is. It creates ninety-nine losers for every winner, and it leaves even the winners wondering what it is that they have won.

This attitude of respecting people on the basis of how attractive and productive they are is especially cruel to teenagers. It says to them that, unless you’re Brooke Shields, you don’t count. You’re not worth anything because you don’t have a real job. You don’t look good, you don’t earn money, therefore you don’t exist. There are a good number of high school students here at services today. I’d like to ask them if they’ve ever had the experience of being ignored in a store by a salesperson who takes care of an adult who came in after you instead of helping you.

I suspect that’s why so much teenage energy is channeled into violence: "I’m going to make you notice me and take me seriously." From Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley to the gangs who terrorize passengers on Boston’s subways, random violence is the outburst of the person who can’t get noticed any other way. Or else. instead of becoming violent, young people become depressed, closed off. They turn to drugs and increasingly to suicide, their response to a world which has rejected them, which has said to them, "Unless you’re spectacularly good looking Or you have a lot of money, it’s as if you didn’t exist."

And as hard as this narrow definition of success is on young people, on middle-aged men and women, it is perhaps hardest of all on the elderly. What is it like to be old in a country which takes you seriously only if you look good and earn money? What does it mean when you have worked all your life, to stop working and have to face the question, "What do you do?" Not just, "What do you do with your time?", but how do you understand who you are? When somebody asks you, "What do you do?", and for forty or fifty years, you’ve been accustomed to answering in terms of your work, who are you when you have no job? America respects people who make money, and you’re not doing that anymore. America admires people with firm skin and lithe figures and bright, perky faces, and that’s no longer what you do best. No wonder that so much of American society gives you the message that old age is a social disease like tuberculosis, and we should feel sorry for people afflicted with it and find ways to isolate them from the rest of us until we can cure them of it.

Why do we tolerate this? Why do we put up with a system that either ignores us or insults us, that is constantly telling us we’re not good enough, we’re failures? We’re too old or too young, too ordinary looking or too unambitious to be successful? Is there no other definition of success? One that we can live with and feel good about? Of course there is an alternative. Instead of the American definition where being successful means being attractive and productive, there is the Jewish definition of success where to be successful means to be wise and good. Not physical attractiveness, not making money, but wisdom and goodness, - that is what makes your life a success story.

What does it mean to be wise? It’s more than being smart, having a high I.Q., knowing a lot of facts. A teacher of mine once defined the difference by saying that a clever person knows how to get out of a situation that a wise one would never have gotten into in the first place. Wisdom means understanding how things work, what is worth doing, and what the likely consequences of your actions will be. Wisdom means being able to rise above passion and instinct, and see even your own actions without defensiveness.

It doesn’t automatically come with age; there is no shortage of foolish, selfish old people. But it tends to be tied to experience, to having been around long enough, learned from your mistakes and other, people’s, and having had the fires of youth banked enough so that you’re not distracted by their glare.

Listen to what our Midrash has to say about people who are too old for physical labor. You know that in Biblical times, the Kohen, the priest, was the leading religious figure at the Temple, performing the sacrifices and carrying out the rituals. And he was assisted by the Levites who did a lot of the behind-the-scenes work. They would open and close the gates to the Temple every morning and evening. They would take care of the animals in their pens, feeding and grooming them and cleaning up the mess after the sacrifices were over. They did it gladly because it was sacred work, but it was also physical labor, hard, messy work. And so the Torah requires that Levites retire from their work at age fifty.

The rabbis of our Midrash, many of whom, I suspect were in their fifties and sixties, are uncomfortable with the law of the Torah that a Levite has nothing to contribute after he reaches middle age. How is it possible that a person with thirty years of experience should have to sit around with nothing useful to do? So they redefine this law to mean that he is excused from physical labor, but he remains as a kind of elder statesman, teaching the younger Levites how to carry on their duties properly, how to live in the midst of all this holiness without either becoming so blase about it that it becomes just another job, or else becoming so involved with the world of the Temple that you lost touch with the world outside. The older Levites would make their wisdom and experience available to the younger ones.

There is a text which says that the only job the older Levites still did was ne’ilat shearim, closing the gates. Why that particular job? Why closing? Is opening the gates that much harder? One rabbi suggests that ne’ilat shearim doesn’t mean literally closing the Temple gates at night. It means telling the younger people which gates to close in their lives and which ones to keep open, which opportunities to take advantage of, open the door when opportunity knocks, and which opportunities to avoid, which gates you’re better off not entering. When they could no longer serve the community with their physical strength, they would serve it with their wisdom, their understanding of life born of their own mistakes and their own successes.

Now there is a definition of success that doesn’t have to be achieved at somebody else’s expense. Nobody has to lose wisdom for you to gain some. There is a kind of success that they can’t take away from you as you grow older. You don’t have to dread the new year because it makes becoming successful that much less likely, because it’s getting too late for You to be the success you once dreamed of be-coming. The more you’ve tried, the more you’ve failed and learned from your failures, the more successful you already are at acquiring wisdom.

The question this day puts to us when we venture to pray for success and we are asked, "What do you think it means to be successful?", the question we can’t avoid, is "What have you achieved with all your hard work and your sacrifice?" Has it only gotten you not quite enough money, almost enough prestige and promotion and personal satisfaction, and nothing more? Or have you, over the years, acquired the skill of ne’ilat shearim, of knowing which gates to open and which to leave shut, what is worth reaching for and what is better left alone. If with all your acquiring, you have managed to acquire that sort of wisdom, there will be very little that you will lack.

The Jewish definition of a success story—the person who grows to be wise and good. We understand what it means to be wise; what does it mean to be good?

It means making room for people in your life. The opposite of goodness is selfishness, being so wrapped up in your own life that you never notice that there are other people out there in the world. The person who lives only for himself, no matter how well he does it, is a failure because we define success as growing beyond the confines of the self and letting other people into your life. The person who uses other people to advance his own ends is a failure even if he learns to do it very well and gets away with it, because success as a person means recognizing the legitimate personality of other people. And by contrast, the person who tries to be helpful, to be charitable, to be caring, - that person’s life is a success story even if you never get to the point where you’re good at those things. Even if you can’t afford to be as charitable as you like and you feel awkward and inept when you try to help, you’re a success because you’ve learned which doors are worth opening.

My friends, when we come here to pray on the first day of a New Year, once we’ve spoken our prayers for a year of life and health and peace, let’s be clear what else we ought to be praying for. If we accept the popular notion that the only way to be successful is to be either attractive or productive, if we buy the foolishness of the Duchess of Windsor that you can never be too thin or too rich, then there is not much point in our praying for a good year, because those aren’t things you get through prayer. I don’t believe you can pray your way to good looks or wealth.

Winston Churchill was invited to an elegant dinner party one night, in the course of which he had a bit too much to drink. Operating on the theory that wine loosens the tongue and lets unpleasant truths slip out, he went up to his hostess, the wife of a prominent member of the House of Lords, and said to her, "You know, you’re really ugly."

The woman, somewhat taken aback, said to him, "Mr. Churchill, I think you’re drunk."

Churchill answered, "Yes, I probably am drunk, but tomorrow I’ll be sober, and you’ll still be ugly."

If we spend these hours of Rosh HaShanah praying that one day we wake up rich and famous, praying that one morning we’ll look in our mirror and we will have become more attractive, because we think that those are the elements of success, then we will have squandered these hours that come only once a year. We’ll be struggling to open the wrong doors. But if we want our year of life and good health to be deepened by the dimension of authentic success, then let’s understand what success means. Let us reach for a definition of success that young people can begin to have and old people won’t feel slipping away from them, a definition of success which we can achieve without cheating, and so can our neighbors with us. They don’t have to lose for us to win.

Some time ago, Ann Landers gave this definition of success in her newspaper column. I thought it would fit in with these thoughts:

To laugh often and love much,

to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children

to earn the approval of honest critics and to survive the betrayal of false friends,

to appreciate beauty, to accomplish some task whether it be a happy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition, to have played and laughed and worked with enthusiasm,

and to have sung with exultation, on key or off,

to know that even one life has breathed easier because you were there,

That is success.

P’tach lanu sha’ar b’et neilat shaar, May we know which doors to open in our lives and which ones to leave closed. May wisdom and goodness be among the blessings which will be ours in the year ahead.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Rosh Hashanah as the Birthday of Many Creations
by Alan Abraham Kay

[Rosh Hashanah Morning[

The little girl sat quietly in the wagon next to her mother, as the six young men approached on horseback.
“Shah!” her mother whispered. “Don’t say anything. Maybe they’ll leave us alone.”
She knew they wouldn’t. They were hooligans, among the many who harassed the Jews of her Russian village, blaming them for their every misfortune. They wouldn’t go after the czar, so they went after the Jews.
It had been a beautiful morning. It was Ruchele’s fifth birthday. She and her mother were returning from town where Miryam had bought her daughter her first pair of brown leather shoes, to replace the well-worn cloth shoes she had been wearing for months.
The six riders circled the wagon and began cursing. One of them grabbed the reins from Miryam’s hands so quickly, her palms felt as if they had been put over a fire.
The wagon stopped.
Ruchele shivered and pressed close to her mother who bit her lips to conceal the pain in her hands.
“What’s in the wagon?” one demanded.
“Just two small bags of sugar and flour,” Miryam answered. A tear trickled down her cheek.
Another looked at Ruchele’s new shoes and grinned.
“Take off those shoes,” he ordered. “We have no work so we don’t have money to buy shoes for our children. How do you have money? You have the work we should have. Give me those shoes.”
“Please don’t take her shoes,” Miryam pleaded. “They are for her birthday. Take the sugar and flour but leave her shoes.”
The men laughed and one of them reached towards Ruchele and pulled the shoes right off her feet.
He held the shoes in one hand waving them and laughing. Another took the bags of sugar and flour. Shouting and cursing, the six men rode away.
Miryam looked at her hands and at the fright in Ruchele’s eyes and said, “It’s time to tell Papa we have to go to America.”
One year later, on June 21, 1922, my mother, Ruchele, her sister, Dobrish, and her parents, Miryam and Samuel, stepped off the S.S. King Alexander onto Ellis Island.

This morning, I want to talk with you about this Rosh Hashanah as the birthday of many creations, in particular, the birthday of the creation of Jewish life in America 350 years ago this month, an event which opened the door for my mother — to find in this land — the freedom denied her in the land of her birth.
Rosh Hashanah is the spiritual birthday of the Jewish people. Our traditional belief is it is the day on which we, as humans, are judged for the deeds we have done in the year past. But our tradition also teaches that through our sincere repentance on Yom Kippur, any harsh decrees made against us are overturned.

Thus, Rosh Hashanah is a serious day.
However, Rosh Hashanah is also a happy day.

Rosh Hashanah commemorates the creation of the world — five thousand seven hundred and sixty-five years ago.
In our prayers, we recite, “This is the day of the world’s birth.”
Rosh Hashanah is a happy day.
Rosh Hashanah commemorates the day on which God completed creation, forming man and woman and breathing life into them on the sixth day.

In our prayers we recite, “Blessed is our Eternal God, Creator of the Universe, who has made our bodies… the soul that You have given me is pure. You have breathed it into me….”
It is not the day God created the Jewish people — that comes later with Abraham and Sarah — rather, it is the day God created humankind — Adam and Eve — the ancestors of all who sit here this morning.
Rosh Hashanah is a happy day.

On this Rosh Hashanah 5765, we celebrate another creation, the creation of Jewish life in America. Three hundred and fifty years ago last Sunday, September 12th, in 1654, 23 Jewish men, women and children arrived in New Amsterdam, today’s Manhattan, after a perilous sea journey from Recife, Brazil.
This Rosh Hashanah is, indeed, a happy day.
Although this morning I want to talk with you about Rosh Hashanah as the birthday of Jewish life in America, I want to take us back to a time before that September 12th arrival.
The year is 1492.

Christopher Columbus sat quietly in his room in Castile, Spain, thinking about the events which would one day make him one of the world’s most famous persons, and he took time to write in his diary: “After the Spanish monarchs had banished all the Jews from their kingdoms and territories,” he wrote, “in the same month, they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my voyage of discovery to the Indies.”
On March 31, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had given the Jews of Spain four months to leave the country. On August 2, 1492, about 300,000 Jews left Spain. On the next day, Columbus set sail.
Was Christopher Columbus Jewish? Was he a Marrano, a Spanish Jew who practiced his Judaism in secret?
Was his preoccupation with the expulsion of Jews from Spain because Columbus himself was of Jewish descent?
A Spanish historian has written that Columbus was a member of a Spanish Jewish family that left Spain for Italy in about 1390 to escape the Inquisition. The family settled in Genoa where Columbus was born in 1451.

There is evidence to show that converted Jews helped finance Columbus’ voyage.
Luis de Torres, Columbus’ interpreter, is thought to have been a forced convert.
Columbus thought the natives they would meet might be Jews, and de Torres spoke Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, as well as Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and Italian.
De Torres was the first European to set foot on San Salvador, the first island Columbus reached, one of 700 islands comprising the Bahamas.
Today, in Freeport, on Grand Bahama Island, stands the Luis de Torres Synagogue, the only Synagogue in the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, and the pride and joy of this small Jewish Community.

During Shabbat services, the link between the present and the past is related to visitors by the congregation reciting at one point in the service:

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue
And in his crew there was a Jew
And his name was Luis de Torres.

After leaving San Salvador, Columbus stopped at Cuba and there, Luis de Torres decided to settle. Therefore, the Jewish presence in North America, as explorers and itinerant merchants, can be traced back more than 500 years.

Was Christopher Columbus Jewish?
We may never have enough information to answer this question. However, we do know Jews were among the first Europeans, along with Columbus, to set foot on the North American continent and that in 1654, “23 souls, big and small,” decided to make this land their home.

It is a birthday worth celebrating.
It is a birthday for all of us sitting there this morning to celebrate.
As our lives are part of American history, so, too, are our lives part of American Jewish history.

Sitting here this morning are those who count themselves among nearly six million American Jews, whose Jewish ancestors came from a different place to settle in this “new” world.
Sitting here this morning are those who have become Jews by Choice, and who count themselves among the many who have adopted American Jewish history as their own.
Sitting here this morning are those who have chosen to be part of the American Jewish faith community by virtue of marriage, or affinity to Jewish life, and who have adopted American Jewish history as part of their own history.

The Jews who came to New Amsterdam in 1654 had escaped the Spanish Inquisition by fleeing to Holland and later sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil.
From Brazil, they set sail for New Amsterdam where they hoped to find in the Dutch colony, the tolerance which would allow them to practice their Jewish living.
They petitioned Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of New Amsterdam, who, at first, refused to permit the Jews to settle and worship in his small colony.
However, pressure to accept them was placed upon Stuyvesant by the administrators of New Amsterdam, the Dutch West India Company, several of whose directors were Jewish, and who were living in Holland.
Ten years later, in 1664, New England settlers acquired from the Setauket Indians a tract of land stretching from the modern Stony Brook Harbor to Port Jefferson Harbor, including a community known as Old Mans Land, today, the hamlet of Mount Sinai.

The settlement in America of Jews, parallels that of the settlement of their Christian neighbors in Mount Sinai.
In New Amsterdam, and one hundred years later in Suffolk County, when Jews began to settle in this area, Jews lived among their Christian neighbors and had many social and business interactions with them.
They began to feel comfortable interacting with them, starting businesses together and visiting their homes, something rare in the Old World of Eastern Europe.

But living Jewishly in the overwhelmingly non-Jewish world of the colonies was not easy.
Local laws prohibited working on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. If Jews did not work on Shabbat, and only half a day on Friday, they had less than a four-day workweek. Jewish holidays were difficult to observe for the same reason.
Keeping kosher made it hard, and even embarrassing for some people to travel or eat anywhere except at home.
Jews solved these dilemmas in different ways, making this new religious community in America even more diverse.
The changes within the colonial Jewish community made it different from other Jewish communities around the world.
Even though the colonial Jews still felt strong ties to one another and to Jews around the world, their community had a character all its own.
As it does today.
And in this diversity lies the continued strength and challenge of the American Jewish community.

I am proud to call those 23 brave souls our ancestors.
In 1655, one year after their arrival, a Jewish cemetery was established in New Amsterdam, a Torah was brought to the community from Holland, and Jewish life began in earnest in America.

Asser Levy arrived in the colony at this time. He fought for Jews to have the right to citizenship and serve in the local militia, to own property and to serve on a jury.
When he died, court records show his possessions included a pistol and a sword, a Shabbat lamp, a kiddush cup, and a spice box for havdalah.
Although he began his life in the colonies as a poor refugee, he became a well-known businessman and a fighter for religious equality and Jewish rights.
I am proud to call him our ancestor.
Asser Levy was not the only American Jew who became successful in his profession while remaining a vigilant defender of Jewish rights and the rights of all people in this new nation in whose name reflects its mission — “United.”

Aaron Lopez, a merchant of Newport, Rhode Island; Dr. Samuel Nunez, one of the founders of the first synagogue in Georgia, [“Mikveh Israel”] “Hope of Israel,” and Gershom Mendez Seixas, the first American-born rabbi, were among the 2000 Jews living in the 13 colonies by the middle of the 18th century — many whose names are lost to history — but who were steadfast in their loyalty to their Judaism and to their new home in America.
I am proud to call them our ancestors.

By the 1760’s, Jewish families had settled on Long Island and throughout the colonies, and the first synagogue in the New York City Metropolitan area, Manhattan’s Shearith Israel [“Remnant of Israel”] was already 50 years old.
On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, adopted the Declaration of Independence.
Most Jewish colonists, especially those who had been born in the colonies, supported independence. Hart Jacobs was one of those.
In 1776, he asked to be excused from fighting on Friday night because it was Shabbat.
It was ordered that he be permitted not to fight on that night, and that he perform his full tour of duty on other nights.
Haym Salomon, a successful businessman, was
responsible for raising most of the money needed to finance the American Revolution and later to save the new nation from collapse.
At the same time, Rebecca Gratz created her own revolution in philanthropy in Philadelphia, organizing the first American Jewish institutions run by women, including the first Hebrew Sunday School and Jewish orphanage.
I am proud to call them our ancestors.

A century later, Jewish loyalty to America and commitment to developing the nation continued unabated, in both public and private ways.
Hannah Greenebaum Solomon [1858-1942] founded the National Council of Jewish Women; Lillian Wald [1867-1940] established the Henry Street settlement and the Visiting Nurse Service, and Henrietta Szold created Hadassah.
I am proud to call them our ancestors.

At about the time that the first congregation in Suffolk County was founded, North Shore Jewish Center, a tidal wave of Jews began to flood into this country.
Between 1881- 1924, about two million East European Jews settled in America. Later, about 100,000 pre-Holocaust and 250,000 Holocaust survivors sought refuge here.
My mother and her family were among the two million.
In Russia, my mother’s father hid from the soldiers of the czar; ran from the neighborhood bullies; struggled to support his family as a journalist, and found little to make him smile.
In America, he washed store windows on Brownsville Brooklyn’s Pitkin Avenue for 40 years; attended synagogue services every day and laughed at his own Yiddish humor.

My grandmother was a seamstress; made Shabbos every Friday night, and laughed along with my grandfather.
I learned my Judaism sitting at my grandfather’s desk and in my grandmother’s lap and at their Passover table.
I am proud to call my grandparents and yours, our ancestors.
I learned how to meet disappointments by watching them face their challenges of creating a new life for themselves in a country whose language they did not speak, whose ways they did not know, whose stores they could not afford.

Sam Levenson was a humorist who brought much laughter to the generation of my grandparents and parents. He enjoyed recalling the humor that came with growing up in a poor, immigrant family.
He was especially fond of his mother, who prided herself on being able to feed any unexpected company. To do this, she kept a pot of chicken legs always going on the stove. The family was unable to afford whole chickens, but the legs were readily available.
Then came Mama Levenson’s greatest challenge. One day, Uncle Louis and Aunt Lena and their 11 children dropped in unannounced.
Mama was in panic. She simply didn’t have enough legs ready. Her honor was at stake. Hastily, she called her own children into the bedroom and told them, “Children, do me a favor. Say you don’t like chicken.”
The children were understanding and sympathetic. They went back in and refused all the chicken when the relatives offered to share.
Finally, it was time for dessert. The same problem arose, but this time, Mama Levenson didn’t have to call the children into the bedroom. Instead, at the table, she said to one and all: “Now, all the children who wouldn’t eat the chicken, don’t get any dessert.”

But not all Jews were impoverished.

Max Stein arrived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side having no money and knowing no English. He opened a bank account with his first paycheck and signed with two X’s, as was the custom at that time.
A few years later, having prospered, he came to the bank to make a large deposit. This time, he signed with three X’s.
“Mr. Stein,” said the teller. “Why do you now use three X’s?”
Stein answered, “Well, now that I’m doing well, I decided to take on a middle name.”

“Laughter through tears,” is one way to describe Jewish humor, but not the only way. There is also humor that is joyful and celebratory. Whatever its source, Jewish humor is a sign of Jewish optimism about the future.
And the future of Jews in America is linked to the future of all peoples in America.
While two million Jews arrived in the United States in the so-called open door era of 1881-1924, 24 million others poured into this country during that time.
Although primarily European, they were also Asian and African and South American.
Their ancestors sit among us this morning.

Who do you count among your ancestors in this land where promise has no end?
Why did they make journey that brought them here?
Who do you count among your ancestors in this land where Jews enjoy more freedom than any other community of Jews outside of Israel — ever?
What did they ring with them when they made the journey that brought them here?
Who do you count among your ancestors in this land where you can transform your faith to make it more meaningful and find a community to embrace you?
How did they make the journey that brought them here?
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1993 play, Angels in America, Tony Kushner has an elderly Eastern European rabbi from the Bronx eulogizing a fellow Russian immigrant.
“You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist,” he explains to the American-born descendants of this woman.
“But every day of your lives — the miles that voyage between that place and this one — you cross. You understand me. In you that journey is.”

My mother is 89. I visited with her on Monday in the United Hebrew Geriatric Center where she lives now in New Rochelle.
We walked slowly around the block, in and out of the shade of the tall maples and oaks, stopping occasionally so she could touch a leaf on a low-hanging branch or smell a flower or look up at the sun.
On her feet were soft brown shoes my sister had recently bought for her. Perhaps more than any other item of clothing, shoes are most precious to her.
When we returned to her home, we paused at the large monthly calendar posted on the wall near the entrance.
“Mom, there will be Rosh Hashanah services here on Thursday morning at 10 o’clock. Don’t forget to attend.”
She smiled.

Every day of my life, the miles of my mother’s voyage to America, I cross.
In me that journey is.
Every day of your life, the miles of your ancestors’ journey to America, you cross.
In you that journey is.

As we celebrate this 350th birthday, let us recall the journeys that have brought our ancestors to America from every corner of the earth: of diverse backgrounds and persuasions — men, women, and children, many of whom fled oppression and embraced opportunity, escaped persecution and found freedom, shunned indignity and pursued equality for themselves and their descendants.
Finding their home in this nation of immigrants, our ancestors responded with enthusiasm to the promise of religious liberty and equality of rights, freely adding their own voice to the American sound.

On this Rosh Hashanah, when we celebrate the birthday of Jewish life in America, I call upon you to commit yourselves to a year of celebration — by learning more about your own family’s history in America.
I call upon you to reaffirm, in word and in deed, the reverence for justice, freedom, equality and respect for diversity that has made America the haven it has been for all Americans.
I call upon you to transmit the lessons of the past to those who will carry on after us, and to shape a vision for the future worthy of our heritage and of the opportunity we enjoy.
And I call upon you to embrace change.

“Like it or not,” Rabbi Michael Sternfield observes, “change is the only constant. Our world,” he goes on to say, “has changed immeasurably in our own lifetimes. Judaism is not immune to the pressures and challenges of change.
“One of the great strengths of the Jewish religion, over the many centuries, has been its ability to respond creatively to change, to adjust to new realities.”
Jonathan Sarna, distinguished professor of American Jewish history, and “Celebrate 350’s” scholar-in-residence,* offers a perspective on these realities.
“Many questions face American Jews as they mark their 350th anniversary on American soil. Should they focus on quality to enhance Judaism, or focus on quantity to increase the number of Jews? Embrace intermarriage as an opportunity for outreach, or condemn it as a disaster for offspring? Build religious bridges, or fortify religious boundaries? Strengthen religious authority, or promote religious autonomy? Harmonize Judaism with contemporary culture, or uphold Jewish tradition against contemporary culture? Compromise for the sake of Jewish unity, or stand firm for cherished Jewish principles?
In my answers to these questions, from intermarriage as an opportunity for outreach — to building religious bridges — to harmonizing Judaism with contemporary culture, I stand with those who are willing to face the challenges of the new realities, while, like our early ancestors in America, hold steadfast to our Judaism.
You hear me say the words each Friday evening when we take our Safer Torah from our Aron haKodesh, our Holy Ark: “In this scroll is the secret of our people’s life from Sinai until Sinai. Its teaching is love and justice, goodness and hope. Freedom is its gift to all who treasure it.”
Each time we take our Torah from our Ark, we stand again at Sinai, as the multitude which left Egypt stood at Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. [Exodus 12:38].
In our Torah portion last Shabbat, the multitude — which has multiplied – stands again with Moses near the end of their desert sojourn and within sight of the land of Canaan.

“You stand this day, all of you, before the Lord your God — your tribal heads, your elders and your officials, all the men of Israel, your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp….” [Deut. 29: 9-10]

Who is the stranger? He is not an Israelite, but one who has chosen to cast her lot with the Israelite community and participate with it in various religious celebrations.
This is what happens here in Temple Beth Emeth.
Our welcoming words from the prophet Isaiah, is clearly visible on the sign that stands on our temple’s front lawn: Temple Beth Emeth: A House of Prayer for All Peoples.
We are a community of many peoples: interfaith, interracial, interethnic; gay and lesbian, single, widowed, divorced; we are a community of many backgrounds.
But we stand together this day before God, as we stand together every Shabbat, every festival and holy day, and listen as the Torah is read.
This is our strength as a faith community: we enable everyone who wants to be connected, to find with us their spiritual home.
This is our strength today. This is our future. And this is our challenge.
Today, about 1500 Jews live in Recife, Brazil.
Today, there are nearly two million Jews in New York State alone, and New York City remains the principal port of entry and site of settlement for new Jewish immigrants, including Iranian, Israeli and Russian Jews.
Today, in Mount Sinai, formerly Old Mans Land there is a Jewish house of worship, Temple Beth Emeth.
We may be a faith community small in number, but we are large in our dedication to faith, family, and service to our community and nation.
On this Rosh Hashanah, it is our duty to give thanks for having been sustained and enabled to reach this birthday.

Return to Get-to-the-Points at top of this page    |     Return to First Page

Note: Sermons for other than basic Rosh Hashanah topics are presented in "Jewish Concepts & Subjects"

Living Up to Our Dreams
by Sidney Greenberg

During the 18th and l9th centuries, a favorite form of social entertainment for European aristocrats was the masked ball. The guests would each come in costume and wear some disguise. When the midnight hour struck, off came the masks and each guest stood revealed in his or her true identity. A Swedish theologian was thinking of these masked balls when he said, "There comes a midnight hour when all men must unmask."

For us Jews, these Days of Awe strike our spiritual midnight hour. On these days we are summoned to appear before God without masks or disguises. We stand stripped of all pretense before him who, in the words of the Bible, "does not look as man looks; for man looks with the eyes but God looks into the heart." He is the searcher of hearts and the revealer of hidden things on the Day of Judgment.

The habit of wearing masks is one which all of us have cultivated. The very word "person" in English comes from the Latin "personna" which means "a mask." To be a person is to wear a mask.

Each of us wears a mask all year long. We have to, to keep our nerve endings hidden. To keep our hopes and needs, and hang-ups, our fears and prides and prejudices, our irrationalities and our cry-buttons from hanging out for everyone to stare at, or step on.

We wear these shells to work, to lunch, to meetings and to church. We always keep them handy for when friends drop in. And adjust them for which friends drop in. Inside each of us, no matter how old or young we are, is a person who is worried about his money, his age, his looks, his health, his happiness, his family and whether people like him. Or hate him."

"All the world's a stage," wrote Shakespeare, "and all the men and women merely players." We are "role players," say the modern psychologist, and the book Games People Play became a best seller because it threw the bright spotlight of attention on the masks we are constantly wearing and changing in our relationships to each other.

There is an amazing assortment of masks. We've got trunks full of them. One kind of mask is fashioned by eternal circumstances. Not infrequently a man who has made it big suddenly dons a mask. His friends of humbler days no longer recognize him. "I don't know what's gotten over George. He doesn't seem the same any more."

Another kind of mask is the one frequently worn by our unworthy emotions. The more we learn about ourselves the more impressed we become with the devious facades behind which our emotions are prone to conceal themselves Abnormal fears wear the mask of pain; hate masquerades as love; guilt assumes the appearance of grief, and cowardice promenades as illness.

When we cannot accept certain emotions they camouflage themselves with a cloak of respectability. They too wear masks. And often we put the mask of virtue of the face of our faults. I read recently a quip about a very expensive surgeon who is said to be also quite compassionate. If a patient cannot afford the cost of an operation, he offers to touch up the x-rays a bit. We do that, you know. Rather than go through the pain of removing an ugly growth upon our character we cover it with some mental cosmetics until it looks downright pretty. Masks, it would seem, are instruments of deception and whether we delude ourselves or others is immaterial. To attempt to live our lives behind masks is as treacherous as erecting a skyscraper on a foundation of sand. John Erskine gave eminently sound advice when he urged, "Put on what man you are, put off the mask."

And yet, after we have said all this there is a lingering feeling that we have not explored this truth completely. The fact is that certain masks are quite indispensable for living. Were we entirely incapable of masking our true feelings, we often could not perform our assigned tasks. The salesman soliciting an order may be quite worried about his sick little boy at home, but unless he can put on the mask of enthusiasm over his product, he will not be able to provide for his sick child. The restaurant hostess may be heartsick over a shattered marriage, but unless she can wear the mask of radiant good cheer she may soon find herself without a job. The professional counselor may have a host of personal problems gnawing away at him, but unless he can put on the mask of certainty and composure he will soon lose his usefulness to those who enlist his aid. The grieving widow may feel an awesome burden of sorrow oppressing her heart but if she cannot manage to mask her true feelings, she may find friends hard to come by.

And any one of us may find ourselves at the bedside of a dear friend or a loved one suffering from a fatal disease and unless we can put on the mask of hopefulness and confidence we will betray our mission of mercy. All of us. at one time or another, must play Pagliacci wearing the mask of the carefree, laughing clown over a face distorted by pain and twisted in agony. As a temporary facade behind which to conceal untimely emotions, masks are not only permissible, they are priceless.

And let us go now even further and suggest. that despite frequent misuse of moral masks, even they can serve a most salutary function in our lives. We could all grow into finer human beings if we learned to wear the mask of the finest human being we know--not in order to pretend to be what we are not, but rather as a means of aspiring to be what we can become. If we would become kinder and more sympathetic, we would do well to assume the pose and strike the attitude of the kindly and sympathetic person. If we would become more understanding and more merciful, we could profitably don the masks of understanding and mercy. Someone has said with fine insight, "Act human and you will become human." In the very process of playing the role of a better person, we can take an impressive forward stride in actually becoming better. All aspiration is partial realization. That, it seems, was the point of Hamlet's advice to his mother, "Assume a virtue if you have it not."

One of the most dramatic illustrations of this truth was provided by the actor Richard Berry Harrison, who played the role of "De Lawd" in the original production of "Green Pastures." Harrison was chosen for the role because of his powerful build and deep resonant voice, not necessarily for any spiritual qualities. People who watched him perform in the play testified, as did Harrison himself, that after 1,700 performances as the Lord he had become a highly spiritualized individual. As he himself explained it, he strove to become godlike, to be worthy of the role he played. He tried with conspicuous success to live up to his mask. He demonstrated the truth of Professor Hocking's assertion: "There is a deep tendency in human nature to become like that which we imagine ourselves to be."

The implications of this truth help us to understand one of the basic functions of the Synagogue in our lives. The Synagogue possesses no magical qualities. It cannot painlessly and dramatically convert everyone of us into a saint. Too frequently a failure to understand this prompts those who do not attend Synagogue services to point to the moral inadequacies of those who do as proof of the impotence of the Synagogue, and, therefore, as justification of their own absence.

A Rabbi suggested to a non-affiliated member of his community that he ought to join his Synagogue. The latter waved aside the Rabbi's suggestion with, "I can't go to your synagogue. There are too many hypocrites there."

Whereupon the Rabbireassured him, "Don't worry, there is always room for one more."

The non-Synagogue Jew is not, of course, less hypocritical than the Jew inside the synagogue but this layman's effort at self-justification reveals a common misconception of what the synagogue promises. It does not put forth the claim that attendance at worship in and of itself makes perfect ethical and moral human beings out of men and women subject to greed selfishness, and passion. No honest religion could make so exorbitant a claim. What the Synagogue can do for us is, first, to help us in the selection of our moral mask. It holds forth for us an image of what we can become. It encourages us to aspire towards integrity, honesty, generosity, fidelity. It asks us to make these goals our own.

Deep within each of us there is an intimation of a larger human being, a grander self than we have ever been. There is a nobler man and woman yearning to be called into life. The breath of life for which that person craves is in our power to bestow. Because we know this, there is forever a straining to become, a divine tension between what is and what ought to be. Our coming to the House of God does not mean that we have resolved the struggle. Our coming may be part of our battle. We are not pretending to be perfect. We are just trying to become better. The synagogue helps us to sharpen the image of our highest potential self. Having shown us a vision of what we might become, the synagogue, if we expose ourselves to its influence, urges us to live up to
our masks.

The Synagogue and our tradition assure us that, given persistent effort and continuous striving, we can indeed erase the differences between the lines of our own faces and the masks we habitually wear. This may be one legitimate interpretation of the well known Rabbinical principle: "Machshavha tovah hakadosh baruch hu mitztarfah l'maaseh." Good thoughts, persistently held, are translated by God into deeds. God is the power who helps us bridge the chasm between what we are and what we aspire to become.

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page

Life’s Transitions
by David S. Goldstein

Welcome back, my dear, friends. Welcome home! Yes, we are home again. Reassembled here with our people in this our majestic house. We have come back home for our annual rendezvous with our hidden, innermost souls; with our people; and, above all, with our eternal God. Wherever we may have been as Jews throughout the year, tonight we have come home.

Each of the next 10 days, leading to Neilah on Yom Kippur afternoon, contains its own compelling message; its own drama and energy— its own inspiration. But, in many ways it is Erev Rosh Hashanah, above all—this service, that is the most stirring, and perhaps, the most challenging, too. For this setting, this night, this time and this place may be no less than spiritual coordinates of the heart and the soul.

Suddenly we shift from considerations of the ordinary to contemplations of the sacred. From the routine to the holy. From the day-to-day, to the Day of Judgement.

Impermissible in this house, and on this night, is the mundane. The self-absorbed. The insensitive. The vulgar. For, this is the night of Rosh Hashanah. This is the night of Avinu Malkenu. Avinu Malkenu—let the new year be a good year for us.

Another year. Another transition. Many of us experience transitions at other times as well. Not only at the beginning of a new year. Our lives are filled with changes. Transitions in relationships. Beautiful transitions: engagements and marriages, pregnancies and births.

Others, not so beautiful: divorce and separation; loss of trust. Loss of dreams.

Still, other transitions: retirement; children moving away and starting their own independent lives. New enterprises. Unclear, unresolved transitions. Transitions with which we cope because we must. We have no choice: illness, injury, slowing down because of age.

Some transitions shake our worlds: the death of a loved one, and the aching absence of their presence, of their voices, in our lives. We are constantly crossing bridges of change and passing into unchartered territory.

You remember that great teaching of Reb Nahman of Bratzlav?

"The whole world is a very narrow bridge."

But, the important thing is not to be afraid. Not to be afraid.

One of my favorite books was written by Gail Sheehy, years ago,.called Passages. She writes about the predictable transitions that we all face.

The trying 20’s, when we pull up our roots and leave the safety and security of home.

And the important thing is not to be afraid.

The turbulent 30’s when many of our youthful illusions are shaken. Not to be afraid.

The forlorn 40’s,, when we reassess our dreams. Not to be afraid.

The resigned 50’s, when we make peace with the reality of our lives. Not to be afraid.

The serene 60’s; the sage 70’s; the grateful 80’s. Not to be afraid.

Transitions from the past—to the present—to the future, that can and should be pathways, passages and bridges to deepened meaning and purpose and hope.

So let’s begin with the past. A renowned psychologist once taught this: Do not curse the past. Don’t nurse it, and surely don’t rehearse it.

I think she meant, in the first place, that no one is immune to injuries of the past. But, there comes a time when anger must end. We need to make peace. Stop blaming it—or ourselves. Forgive. Nursing the past. Holding on to our injuries. Not letting go. Giving those hurts a permanent home in our spirits. Rehearsing them over and over again like some terrible Greek tragedy, permitting them to rule us permanently.

Rosh Hashanah teaches that we need to liberate ourselves from the prisons of our past. Past hurts, mistakes, misused opportunities. We need to forgive, and focus our hearts and spirits and minds on the present.

It teaches "today". "Ha-Yom". Ha-Yoni the world came into being. Today!

And, it is true. We have a unique, beautiful power, an extraordinary power, if we would tap it, to cross our life’s bridges and make the transitions that enable us to live fully in the present. Ha-yom!

Rabbi Milton Steinberg was a wonderful Rabbi and teacher. He used to tell this story about the importance of living in the present.

Imagine that there is a bank that credits our account each morning with $86,000. It carries over no balance from day to day. And every evening it deletes whatever part of the balance we have failed to use during the day.

What would we do? Draw out every cent, every day. Leave not one penny.

In truth, each of us has such a bank. Its name is time.

Every morning it credits us with 86,000 seconds of life. Every night it writes off, as forever lost, whatever of it we failed to use for good purpose.

It carries over no balance. And - it surely allows no overdraft.

We, too, live on today’s deposit. Shouldn’t we therefore use it so as to gain from it the maximum? For, the clock is always ticking. Inevitably must we make the transition to that mystery which is the future. Not, I hope with fear and trepidation. But with hearts at peace.

We are not alone. There is a power greater than ourselves, a source of strength to which we can and must connect. A power that can enable us to fulfill our lives and give purpose to our days. We dare not waste our talents, our gifts, our potential. We dare not condemn ourselves.

We can become what each of us was meant to be. What each of us was created for. And why each of us is on this earth.

Transitions. Transitions that make all the difference.

Judaism holds the key to crossing the bridges of our lives’ transitions. Not just from the weekday to Rosh Hashanah. From the ordinary to the exceptional. But for all the passages of our lives. And that key is faith. It is faith. It has always been faith.

Faith that the past can be ennobled and cherished for its good: a source of inspiration and courage and of deepest, most worthy self-knowledge.

Faith that the present moment can be held high and uplifted like a beacon of our spirits. An impetus for productive, meaningful, happy lives; for lives of discovery and zest, of achievement and of oy.

Faith that the future can be met and embraced without fear. But, with gratitude on our lips, thanksgiving in our spirits, and love in our hearts.

Faith. Faith in God. God, the source of our existence. God, the sustainer of our days years. God, the hope by which we ever bless tomorrow.

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page

Our Thoughts on Rosh Hashanah
by Jonathan L. Hecht

Two minks were attempting to escape from hunters. The dogs were closing in. The minks had tried every avenue open to them. In their desperation they decided to split up. Before separating, one mink turned to the other and said, "Well, see you on Rosh Hashanah."

This joke is about what we all do on Rosh Hashanah. We look around to see how others look, what they are wearing, and how they have aged. A joke, to be sure, and we can all afford to laugh at ourselves a little, even on such a solemn occasion as this, but sometimes a joke tells us something profound. This joke is based on one of the central experiences of Rosh Hashanah: seeing others and being seen. Every Jewish holiday has an essential ritual associated with it: On Passover, we have the Seder; On Sukkot, the Booth; and on Yom Kippur, we fast. But on Rosh Hashanah we see others and we ourselves are seen for the first time since last New Year. This is the central experience of Rosh Hashanah.

A colleague of mine put it this way:

The main thing about seeing and being seen is that no one-no one-has gotten younger since last year. All of us have gotten older. But on Rosh Hashanah this is not depressing. Somehow, growing older together, at least on Rosh Hashanah, is the way things are meant to be. It is even beautiful, somehow sacred.

We notice the faces and the fashions. This one has gained some weight. That one looks a bit pale. And look at her baby, he’s now six feet tall! Isn’t that amazing? And there is little "What’ s her name?" sitting with her new husband. And where is ... ? Oh, I forgot, the funeral was six months ago. And so it goes. (Lawrence Kushner, The World of the High Holidays, p. 70)

What is it about Rosh Hashanah that makes seeing and being seen so central? Is it just that we haven’t seen each other in a year? Or is there is a connection between this experience and the meaning of the holiday itself? Just as every holiday has a central ritual, every holiday has a central meaning. A theme that makes it unique: On Passover the theme is redemption; On Yom Kippur it is atonement; and so on.

What is the theme for Rosh Hashanah? It is "time," the unrelenting passage of time. Today, we look around and see what time has wroght; How time has treated our friends; And, at some point, we wonder: How time is treating us?

Our liturgy asks: "What is time? It is a fading flower, a moving shadow that passes away

Life is like a dream: We have dreams throughout life—in our youth, in our middle age, and when we are older. When we are young, we dream of what we are going to be when we grow older, what our families will be like, what our lives will be like. When we become mature, we dream of what we are doing and what we have yet to achieve. When we are older, we dream of what we have done: what we accomplished and what we failed to accomplish. (Kravitz, High Holiday Outlines, #5)

On Rosh Hashanah we wake from our dreams and compare them to reality. We ask ourselves, what is important? What of our dreams should remain dreams, and what is really important enough that we should strive to make real in the coming year?

All of us are affected by time: it is one of the most important ingredients of the world in which we live. No one has ever seen time, no one has heard it, no one has touched it. We know it’s there, but we cannot even describe it.

Listen to the language we have created to help us understand time: How do we "use" time? How do we "spend" it? I don’t "have" the time? Just by our language we recognize that time is something precious, Like money, it must be allocated properly.

Some people are restricted by time: There is never "enough" time. Our desire to live and experience life is infinite, but our lives are finite. We have no choice but to use time, but we can’t allow ourselves to be restricted by it.

How are you dealing with the passage of time? Do you ever think, "I can’t do that because I’m too old?" If you do, then you are restricted by time.

Rosh Hashanah is an alarm clock: its wake up call is the blast of the shofar. It shouts at us: Wake up, slumberer! How are you using your life? It asks us: What of the past year? What of the future? How will you use the rest of your time?

The shofar calls to us and reminds us that the time we have, no matter how we measure it, is passing. The flowers of our lives are fading, our dreams are flying away. Rosh Hashanah is the day we wake up from our flying dreams. It is the day to discard what had once seemed so precious and focus on what is really important in life? What has time taken from us, and what has it given? Have we made a difference in the world? Is the world better because I lived in it? A colleague of mine said, When we die, "Let it not be said that life was good to us, but rather, that we were good to fife." (Jacob Rudin, GOR, p. 243).

On Rosh Hashanah we awaken and ask: Is some comer of this universe better because I touched it? Did I leave my footprints on the sands of time?

Today people are watching more movies than ever. The wonderful thing about renting movies is that, if I don’t like the ending, I can simply pull the DVD out of the machine and return it to the store. But life is not like that. I can’t return my fife to the store. This is the only script we are going to get in life and we have to play it to the end. The question of today is: How do we define our role?

There is a wonderful exchange in our Mishnah, the great Jewish work of law from the Second Century (Rosh Hashanah 2:9), between two rabbis who were arguing over the fixing of the dates for the High Holidays: We read that Rabban Gamliel, the chief rabbi of his day argued with a colleague over the date of the New Year. Being the chief rabbi he ordered the other rabbi to appear before him on what was the other rabbi’s Yom Kippur.

What is so marvelous about this story is that from it we see how the calendar was fixed by the rabbis of Israel; Not by God; And, not by nature. The reckoning of time is not in nature’s hands, but in our hands. We are the ones who determine time. We are in control of what happens in our lives.

A great medieval poet wrote, Judah Halevi: Avdei Zman, avdei avadim hemah, "The slaves of time are the slaves of a slave." In our busy lives, where calendars and schedules seem to run our lives, where we have become "slaves to time," we ought to remember that we are the ones who control time and not the other way around. We control time, we do not simply suffer through it. We shouldn’t go through life simply enduring, we should go through life living: A rock endures, humans live!

The beauty of the Jewish concept of time is that, each year on the New Year, we receive a new chance, a "fresh start."

Every year, every hour, every moment begins with a question mark. We are the ones who must provide the answer.

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page

A Pebble in the Pond
by Baruch Cohon

Tonight is the beginning of a year. It is also the end of a month -- a very special month.

For one whole month now, according to our calendar, we have been engaged in examining ourselves. our tradition teaches us to look within, and to prepare spiritually for the Yom ha-Din -- the Judgment Day that opens the new year. That's the purpose of the month of Elul.

The month of Elul has another meaning too. A symbolic interpretation of its name -- Elul, spelled with four Hebrew letters: Alef, Lamed, Vav, Lamed. An acronym for four words from our greatest love poem, the Song of Songs: Ani L'dodi V'dodi Lee -- "I belong to my beloved, and my beloved belongs to me." As individuals we were supposed to use the month of Elul to grow closer to those we love. The Jewish People as whole should be using that month to grow closer to G-d.

Now we come to the goal of that process. The eve of the New Year. Have we accomplished anything? What kind of spirit, what kind of character, what kind of essence did we find in ourselves? What kind of Jews begin year five thousand seven hundred sixty-two? Are we any closer to our beloved Creator?

And what kind of "me" do I bring to the new year? Am I any closer to anyone -- or anything -- I really love?

[pause]

A PEBBLE IN THE POND

Long ago, a loving young couple dropped a pebble in a pond of still water. Ripples flowed out from its little splash. Ring after concentric ring. Each a perfect circle, a soft fluid ridge separating it from the next circle. Never intersecting, yet all connected somehow to the center--to the little splash, now melted in smooth water.

I am that pebble. The dent I made is quickly filled. But the wave rings flow out and out and out.

The first ring is my family. The lives closest to mine. Wife, children, grandchildren, the eternal memory of my parents. You feel my strongest energy, the primal push of my life's current. You carry some part of me out into living water -water that I perhaps will never enter... journeying further than any of the trips we took across country or through the world... We feel eel each other through time's soft separating ridges. Each of you, in turn, forms an individual splash too. There the water can get rough. Personal currents can conflict. But each of you also tastes the Torah-water that we shared. "Eyn mayim ella Torah" -- real water, life-sustaining thirst-quenching spirit-cleansing water, can only be Torah. Torah can come in little drops. A Hebrew blessing. A Yiddish song. A joke, a game, a memory. Six weddings. Seven Brisses. Two Bat Mitzvahs and two Bar Mitzvahs, and more yet to flow, G-d willing. Jobs and enterprises and graduations and degrees and honors. Funerals and Yortzites. Tzores & Nakhes. Homes and careers, and distance and longing and reunion.

The second ring is also family. Cousins, in-laws, nieces, nephews. "Mishpokhe," with all the mutual service that word implies -- because "mishpokhe" comes from the same root as the word for a maidservant, "shifkha!" Because what families should do is serve each other. So sometimes we serve each other and sometimes we don't. But there they are, my relatives out there in the second ring, with all the currents we share and all the divergings we never share. Years can pass, and then their wave can break over me. or mine over them. Wherever they are and whatever they do, we still flow from the same sources.

The third ring is friends. New friends are happy whitecaps on the surface. Old friends are deeper, down in the strong current. People who grew with me. Dreamt with me. Learned with me. Laughed with me, sang with me, prayed with me. People whose little splashes met my own. In work or in war or in any of those efforts we held important -- raising children, Torah, Soviet Jewry, the entertainment industry, minyonim, baseball, Holocaust memorials. Business.. the gym.. the shvitz. We shared parts of our lives.

Fourth ring -- my people. Klal Yisroel -- global Jewry. So singular and so divided. I love them, fight with them, despair of them, but hope for them as we all hoped for the Anointed One -- the Moshiakh -- all these centuries. Gravitate to news of Israel and of local Jewish communities in every day's paper. What happened to King David and Rabbi Akiva, happens to me. What happens to a secular Jew in Russia or a primitive Jew in Ethiopia, a settler in Samaria or a Hasid in Brooklyn, happens to me. We are one. Guard the legacy. Search for ways to strengthen it, to add to it, to celebrate it. The humor and the holidays, the food and the fasting, the music and the memories. The quality of eternity.

Fifth ring -- my native land. Worth defending. Worth improving.

Closest to true freedom that mankind ever devised. What a marvelous break to be born in the United States. What a great decision my forebears made to come here. With all the putrid politics, the senseless crime, the corruption pollution vulgarity noise ... but also with the Rockies, the Smokies, the Sierras, with corn-on-the-cob and football and fireworks and Broadway and jazz, with Abe Lincoln and rocket science and Model-A's, with Gentleman Jack and the World Series, with Sousa and Gershwin and Thanksgiving Dinner... my America.

Sixth ring -- the human race. Some nearby. Others out there in another part of the pond. So much water between us. Those whose language I will never understand, and yet they are like me. Those whose minds I will never understand because they are not like me. Those who are my friends and others who could be my friends. And those who will always be my enemies. Somehow we live in the same pond, on the same planet. We float or we sink, together. Earthquakes in Turkey rumble beneath my feet. Tidal waves in Honduras splatter mud in my pond. Astronomers in Australia discover a star, and shed light on me. And the seventh ring is far away. So far and so close. The source of light and earthquakes and tidal waves and stars. The source of all the water and all the life. The Almighty, in His glory, inhabiting the breadth and depth of the universe ... yet present in my pond. Throwing down the challenge to us all, to bring Him into our lives. I try. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I even fail to try. And in His infinite patience He waits for me, as for all of us. Every day can be a new outreach to His presence. A new opportunity. A new ripple. Even from such a little splash. My seven days of creation are seven waves of life. My waves are only ripples, but they go on forever. I am a pebble.

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page

Our Special Time
by Raymond A. Zwerin

Just the other day, I took a moment to look up, and behold, it was Rosh HaShanah again Time flies by. There is no stopping it, no way to make it pause in its ceaseless forward movement toward that bidden place called "later." Time is implacable in its flight. I bumped into an old acquaintance the other day. He had been away from the city for a while. ‘My oldest daughter starts college this week," he noted. ‘My youngest is a junior in high school." I remembered them both as infants; I had named them. I remembered them both as youngsters; I had watched the eldest become a Bat Mitzvah. I fumbled for words. "Where has the time gone?"

We don’t take time to think about time. We ignore it as if there were an unlimited supply of the stuff, as if for us it was endless But it is not endless. It is our most precious commodity. It is the floor on which our life dance is performed. It is the arena in which we play out our years. Each instant is significant; each year, each decade, all the more so. A pundit once wrote:

To realize the value of one year: Ask a student who has failed a final exam. To realize the value of one month: Ask a mother who has given birth to a premature baby. To realize the value of one week: Ask an editor of a weekly newspaper. To realize the value of one hour: Ask the lovers who are waiting to meet. To realize the value of one minute: Ask the person who has missed the train, bus, or plane. To realize the value of one second: Ask a person who has survived an accident. To realize the value of one millisecond: Ask the person who has won the silver medal. To realize the value of a lifetime, ask someone who recently sat shivah for a loved one.

And so, we casually look up, and behold, it’s Rosh HaShanah again. And how very fortunate we as a people truly are. For we are the only people on the face of this planet whose religion encourages us to celebrate time as we do. For most people, time is marked with party and gaiety, loud and raucous. It is as much a denial of time as a celebration. It is, I think, human nature to deny time, to mark it with acts of bravado. As if to say, what’s to worry about. I’m still here, older but strong and still flourishing. I am impervious to the effects of time. My clock ticks slowly. I persevere.

But such is not the Jewish way to view time. We are taught to mark its passage differently. We are taught to make the special times of our life sacred—to invest them with God’s spirit. To bring that which transcends us into our life passages. What a powerful message that can be to those who really hear it. We are taught to value time as a precious treasure, and to celebrate it in such a way as to elevate our lives.

Think about it. Every Jewish life cycle event is marked with a sacred occasion. Baby naming or Brit Milah are occasions for celebration, but they are marked with elements of the sacred. A baby is not merely given a name, but is named after a biblical or Rabbinic figure or after a beloved relative. A baby is not merely named, but rather is brought into covenant with all the generations of our people. A newborn infant is already linked to 3,500 years of continuous tradition. How ennobling is that?!

In the first days of entering the teen years, a Jewish boy or girl is linked to our tradition by being given the Torah to study and to read in public. That is what Bar/Bat Mitzvah is all about—we mark the passage from childhood to incipient maturity by entrusting a 13 year old with our most sacred possession, the Sefer Torah. How significant is that?!

And as a couple stands under the chupah, we recite the Shave Brachot, saying—there is now rejoicing in the streets and courtyards of Judah and Jerusalem for this couple. It is not just the two of you who stand under this wedding canopy at this moment; you are not alone at all. Rather, you are welcomed and appreciated and applauded by a people who spans the globe. All of our people rejoice with you at this moment of your joy. Do not forget that you are not now and never will be existentially alone. And the arms of those who came before you, your ancestors on both sides, also support and sustain you at this moment of your commitment to one another--at this moment of Kiddushin--of sacredness.

Yet is not just life cycle events that are sanctified, every seasonal holiday of the Jewish year is also marked by a valuing of the sacred- If one sits at the Passover Seder and does not remember the historical event that links us as a people to our ancestors who left Egypt, the Seder has been for naught. Passover is about the possibility that miracles happen to our people, and therefore, they are possible in our lives too.

Shavuot, in the summer of the year, is about the sacred possibility that the laws by which we live are actually God"s message to us. As we do good, with each mitzvah, we embrace the divine within, and are enveloped by the divine without.

Sukkot, at the beginning of autumn, connects us to nature. And how we need that connection as more and more, nature shrinks. We destroy our forests, kill off our wildlife, pave our national park lands, and impose housing developments, like so many barnacles, all over our mountains. The sand and the sea, the forests and the creatures therein are all a part of one eco-system and we are obligated to respect it and nurture it. We are not permitted, not entitled by any night, to lip it apart and liter it out of existence due to our chutzpah or greed—Sukkot reminds us that spiritually we are responsible for and partners in the preservation of life and nature; we were not given permission to be its exploiters and act as carpet-baggers for every square inch of greenery.

Chanukah is about defending our integrity. There will always be those who wish to destroy us. It is the hand we Jews have been dealt. It will never be otherwise. But we are an indomitable people—resourceful, eternal. Vigilance and never surrendering our values are the dues we pay for surviving. Chanukah reminds us that, always and ever, Antiochus lurks in the shadows; the values of others beckon—a siren song whispered constantly telling us and our children to give up what we have been, give in to what is different and novel and pervasive. But the candles on the Chanukiah, at the winter of our year, are a spiritual reminder that we ultimately never have, and hopefully, never will give up what we are or give ‘in to the siren calls of society.

And Purim, perhaps the most insightful of all Jewish time, comes to teach us about irony. The Jew who would hide her identity, must act to save her people from an evil that would destroy her, too. Hiding is not an option. Jonah finds that out in our Yom Kippur afternoon Haftarah reading. Hiding is not an option -- Herod and Hadrian and Torquemada and Hitler taught us that. So, life is about standing up and being counted. Purim makes fun of the masks. Go ahead and wear them, but you are recognized anyway.

So, hiding is not an option. Your people and your connection with them are sacred and cannot long be severed.

Shabbat, our weekly observance, is only about time. Heschel called it a palace in time; a refuge from the mundane and the humdrum. Shabbat is a day that becomes bride and queen, when pauper and prince alike are royalty. Shabbat teaches that what we know, how we act, and how we relate is the yardstick of our lives. We are not measured by what we have, but by how we live. On Shabbat, you and you and you are royalty, your majesty-- part of a kingdom of priests and a holy people. Savor that concept; relish it; delight in it; do not take it for granted. Welcome Shabbat even if only for an evening, a service, a dinner together, an hour, even if but for a moment.

And now comes this time of year. We look up and behold it is Rosh HaShanah again. Gevalt! Time passes so quickly. And that is exactly why this new year season, this holy time is so very precious. We come to this sanctuary not to celebrate, but to cerebrate, to contemplate, to reflect, to imagine ourselves anew, to recreate ourselves as only we might do that. These services ... this holy day season are not therapy sessions, but they can be a growing experience. They are not rocket science, but they can be just as up-lifting. They are not medicinal, but they can be part of a healing process. They are not magical, but they can be eye-opening.

So how might we best prepare ourselves for this gift of time to introspect? How might we best take advantage of these ten days of teshuvah, of returning to the best that is within us? Perhaps by asking ourselves to maintain focus during our worship together.

Here are the questions to ask yourself as you sit in this sanctuary surrounded by family and friends or even if surrounded by strangers.

On yontif, Jews are not strangers; we are all family no matter how far from home we may be. For even if we are visitors here, we are accompanied to this sacred moment by all who came before us— by all who sat in synagogues in years past, in Denver or in Vilna, or in Minsk, New York, Granada, Firenzi, Sarajevo, Casablanca, or in Jo’berg, Rio, Cochin, or in Bagdad, Shanghai ... or even in Anatevka.

Here are your focus questions:

How do I best experience myself as a Jew? As a member of this age-old people, what do I want from this Machzor, this prayer book? What do I want it to tell me? What words really speak to me and why? What memories or feelings or hopes or insights does the prayer I am now reading evoke in me? Can I let the words take me where they will? Do I resist and if so why? What does the music say to me? Can I hear the hopes and prayers of those who came before me rise on the memorable melodies? Can the music enter not Just my ears, but also nourish my soul? What do I want of the people sitting beside me? How can we help each other to experience the most from this time together?

What do I want from God, whatever I conceive that which is inconceivable to be? And what do I have to offer in return? What mysteries do I try to unravel? Why is the process so daunting? In what ways have I succeeded? What keeps me from going further? What do I bring of my inner self to this service? How have I prepared myself for this worship experience? What do I want the experience to do with me or for me? What parts of my life need healing? When shall I begin the process?

For what am I most grateful? Have I given thanks often enough? When shall I begin to appreciate what blessings are already mine to enjoy, instead of seeing only what I feel I am missing? And how shall I express my gratitude? What shall I do with my thankfulness? What dark places within need light? What angers need to be assuaged and put aside so that I may get on with life?

What do I intend to accomplish the New Year? In what ways will I act so as to benefit others? To whom must I apologize and make atonement? What habits or patterns will I change? What talents will I nurture? In what ways will I be stronger and more fulfilled when we gather as community this time next year? How will I use the time that flows so swiftly? How will I learn to make time sacred?

Time waits for no one. Treasure every moment you have. Use these next ten days to introspect and to reflect on just who you have become, and on the who you want to be, and on the journey you will take to get there.

May our thoughts and prayers as individuals and as a holy congregation strengthen our personal resolve and light the way for us as we make our lives a sacred journey.

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page

Alaskan Exposure
by Yossi Feintuch

RFecently, our family spent a short and sweet vacation in Alaska, the true last American frontier. Once we drove away from metropolitan Anchorage we did not find familiar signs of national chain eateries and filling stations--they were altogether few and far between.

Indeed, any such facilities—mostly rustic and log-structured—that we found along the way were different from each other in shape or contours. Every such service business and its own individual name and identity; gone was the all-too-familiar and fixed vista of corporate America’s billboards so profusely featured on the sides of our interstate highways in the lower forty-eight.

Soon after our arrival at the Denali National Park, we hit the walking trails and went to sample the natural beauty around us. Every so often we would come to a place where another quasi-trail veered off from the one we were on. However, such tracks were already covered with new vegetation and fresh growth of plants. Posted signs asked hikers to keep off in order to allow for the restoration to nature of these formerly trekked-on trails.

The matter soon became clear to us when a park’s ranger told us that in Denali, the hiking trails are changed every three years. "It’s not only", she explained, "that we want to allow returning hikers to experience the area in a new way. Most importantly, we do not want to have here a permanently fixed trail system. That would be an artificial and adverse imposition on nature. If nature is to preserve its ability for re-growth, we must not allow any trail to be beaten down to soil level."

Returning hikers are thus reminded that it isn’t wise or beneficial to both nature and hiker to tread on the same old tracks of previous years. Further, hikers are introduced to an ever-renewed trail system that makes one’s new experiences in the park far from routine or ordinary.

Backpackers are also committed to "Outdoor Ethics" or LNT (Leave No Trace). They must burn or preferably pack out ALL their trash and personal waste, toilet paper and all to avoid contaminating the pure ecosystem of the park. Mother nature flora and fauna alike, equally benefit from such an integrated healthy approach.

The High Holy Days bid us to follow a similar approach. They demand that we too chart and open new trails of living while attending to, and preserving our integrity, responsibilities and obligations to our religious and spiritual ecosystem.

They demand that we avoid impacting adversely on our own environment by using repeatedly past routes that should be changed or discarded for everyone’s benefit. The High Holy days demand that we too burn, bury and pack out the trash and garbage of our life; these must not be allowed to stay in our personal ecosystem lest we ruin it beyond repair.

This is the hour to ask ourselves whether we are prepared in earnest to grade fairly our overall performance in last year’s class of wise living? Have we loved enough not only our dear and near ones, including ourselves, but also other fellow human beings and other living creatures?

Martin Buber, one of Judaism’s greatest modern philosophers, taught us that a person becomes "‘I"—a full human being—when he sees his fellow as "thou," not as a mere "it"—an object that we may use or use up for selfish reasons. Tonight, let us try and understand what Buber meant, that is seeing other fellows as equally unique and worthy as we’d like to consider ourselves. This is the ultimate glorification of God. And this is when we come into genuine, intimate, and mutual relationship with God. Indeed, let us remember that a person who looks up to God rarely looks down on any person.

It is terribly hard to concern ourselves in earnest with the needs of others, especially the less fortunate—which is what love is. But the call to do this rings out almost from every page of the Torah; it is the essence of Judaism. It is very hard to notice that there are needy people around us, and even harder to admit that we ourselves are needy.

We—each and every one of us—become needy when we never bother to discover what the Sabbath—our holiest day in the year -- could do for us. For it is the very day set aside by a loving God for our personal weekly re-creation (or re-Jew-venation). Folks who cannot resist once a week the demands of their living-making for the sake of their life-making, "are emptier and less resourceful" says the Catholic author, Thomas Cahill in his book The Gifts of the Jews.

By contrast, people who disperse their use of the week’s days so in order to allow themselves to live, to be, to relate, people who understand that "man does not live on bread alone," people who make time for elevating the soul and for uplifting the spirit are the most free and liberated people on earth.

"A free people," writes Cahill, "are free to imitate the creativity of God," or in other words are free to re-create their life and environment. To continue and tread on a beaten-to-the-soil trail where every day is basically the same, is a form of death. Yet, it is a preventable death or at least a form of death from which we can resurrect ourselves if we take on seriously and earnestly the challenges of the High Holy days.

The great miracle of the High Holy Days is that after a yearlong period of religious dormancy, many of us, by their being here, by their deliberate, or visceral remembering of this Holy Day seek to infuse a new life in their living. It is the Jewish instinct to return to our heritage, to the faith of past generations, and to impart these quests to the next generation that has brought us here tonight.

This is a wonderful and a wondrous yearning that makes me think of what the Alaska Pacific salmon do every year as they make their annual run from the northern Pacific Ocean to their birthplace in freshwater streams, rivers and lakes, hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Compelled by the instinct of their homing mechanism, the salmon species miraculously know their time to return to their hatchery for spawning. Every summer, the salmon, questing to return home, stop eating—like we will do on Yom Kippur—as they enter the fresh water of their birth place in order to reproduce and guarantee the continuity of their species.

Our own journey tonight from the saltwater of the past year to the fresh water of the New Year—our own basis in time for re-birth— is essentially the same. We too came here driven by our own homing mechanism in order to reproduce a new life for us, for our loved ones, for our community, people and for our world.

It is not easy to make this journey. We have gotten used to the saltwater of the sea to which we migrated from our Jewish birthplace. There are many different fishes in that big sea where the temptation is great to ape the others till you lose our identity and forget to return to the fresh and sweet waters of our birth. Once we allow our Jewishness to be hidden even from our own eyes, we could easily lose it altogether.

Our own way back here to our roots, to our heritage, to our people, Torah and God was not free from hardships either. Is it not wondrous and wonderful that despite our yearlong religious obliviousness and spiritual slumber, our own homing mechanism has worked? Is it not as phenomenal as the return of the salmon to the site of its roots?

We return to learn how to repair the self and mend the world, so our living will become a worthy and meaningful life—a life that the next generation will want to inherit and preserve. This is a feasible and realistic holy mission but it is predicated on our individual and collective leadership ability. We all must become leaders in this on-going challenge.

And it was in Seward -- the original home of Alaska’s Iditarod—where I learned something new about leadership, when we went for a ride in a dog sled driven by husky dogs who were veterans of recent Iditarod races. Once the pupmobile begins to roll, it becomes immediately clear that unless you’re the lead dog the scenery never changes for the other fifteen huskies. The musher will only pick the strongest, fastest and most importantly the most disciplined husky with whom he easily bonds for leading the sled.

Four millennia ago, God picked up one Abraham, a Hebrew with whom God easily bonded to begin a new nation -the Jewish people. Four thousand years ago, Abraham already knew what every sled-pulling lead husky would come to know; that is, unless you lead, the scenery before your eyes never changes.

Abraham could have remained content with continuing in the same senseless religious thinking, obsolete set of beliefs and self-defeating practices of his pagan household. After all, the society from which he and Sarah emerged was rather sophisticated in many other respects.

Yet, he and Sarah chose to be Ivrim (Hebrews) connoting "of the other side (of the river)" - people who chose to distinguish themselves by not allowing others to determine their ethics and religious beliefs. For Abraham and Sarah that meant becoming leaders by moving to a new and unfamiliar land away from the ordinary, routine and comfortable scenery.

Abraham and Sarah chose a new life that would replace for good their being locked up in a pattern of living that never changed and was therefore choking. And this is why Judaism became the first world religion that taught that life should not be a que cera, cera deal.

We can let the pressures and circumstances of life lead us without attempting in earnest to change our scenery. We too can choose by default to remain shackled to our harmful and hurting habits, to our trite and obsolete ways of wasting away our fleeting years. We too can choose to remain like an iditarod husky that is harnessed to its reins mid-way, surrounded by the team, to be sure, but with no say in deciding its own course.

We can say que cera ce-ra—what was will continue to be more of the same. We too can say that this New Year is going to be just like the one that has just ended. Such a way of thinking is uncharacteristic of Judaism and out of sync with the Jewish insistence that tomorrow should be better -- though we will have to earn it by hard work.

Fortunately, our High Holy Days provide us each year anew the opportunity to take charge, to control and to pilot the living of our life. It is the High Holy Days that remind us to truly lead our life, especially when we decide to reform and transform flawed and failing yet fixable aspects of our living.

Folks who do not, however, participate in the tasks of Tzedakah and tikkun olam; people who cannot stop hurting themselves or others through addiction, compulsion, obsession, listlessness and procrastination are enslaved to their personal beaten, indeed abused, trail system. The High Holy Days demand of us a leap of positive thinking -- an openness to new experiences and relationships with ourselves, our fellow human beings, nature and God.

God will not force us to be good; that’s our challenge. Yet, the highest reward that God gives us is this very ability to still do better. It is the High Holy Days that avail to us the motivation and urgency to embark on a new trail that will add more meaning and joy to the living of the rest of our life.

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page

Forgiveness and Reconciliation
by Harold M. Schulweis

The Rabbi of Belz, Shalom ben Elazar Rokeach of the 19th century wrote: There are three types of exile. The first is when Jews are in exile among the nations. The second is when Jews are in exile among Jews. And the third is when a Jew is exiled within himself.

There are Jewish families whose members are in exile; alienated from each other, families whose members do not speak to each other. There are parents who do not speak to their children and children who do not speak to their parents.

There are siblings who do not speak to each other. There are long time friends who are estranged from each other. There are families who live in exile. How do I know? Because my study is a window on the world.

The telephone rings in my study. Papa has died. Arrangements for the funeral must be made.

"I would like to meet with the entire family," I say. The voice on the other end is silent.

"That's not going to be that easy Rabbi," she says.

"Why? Are they not in town?"

"They are in town all right. But the boys haven't spoken to each other for over ten years. And that goes for their children. They won't sit in the same room together.

"But it's their father" I reply.

The other voice says "I know."

I meet with the boys, their wives and their children separately. Not together. And at the funeral the brothers and their respective families will sit separately, not together, not in the family room but on separate benches in separate rows. An angry mechitzah separates the family. Why? How did it start? When did it start? When I ask the origin of the anger, I discover that no one in the family remembers what caused the impasse. No one knows its genesis, but the deadlock continues without end. Who is right? Who is wrong? The silent anger hovers over the "levaiah." Shivah will be in separate homes. After the funeral, one of the brothers whispers:

"Rabbi, can you officiate at separate unveilings?"

The divorced mother, sits in my study with her son to discuss the honors for his upcoming Bar Mitzvah. She is near tears of anger. "I don't want my ex to have an aliyah. He doesn't deserve an honor." She turns to her son, "You don't really want your father up there do you?" The son turns crimson red. Later in the day, his father called me and presented me with a litany of complaints against his former wife. Who is right? Who is wrong? At the Bar Mitzvah the young man is nervous, not because he has not mastered the Haftorah, but because he does not understand the mishpochah. At the Bar Mitzvah, another family mechitzah is raised: separate rows, separate seats and there will be separate Bar Mitzvah receptions.

I have tried to intervene. Most of the time the parties refuse to come together. It's too painful, too burdensome. But being together is indispensable for any sort of dialogue. You can't say "thou" to yourself. I am ever so politely advised to stay out of it: perform your ritual duties, preach the eulogy, offer your commentary, conduct the services." But you can't seal off the study from the sanctuary.

The family will be in the synagogue Yom Kippur in separate rows, at separate services of the sanctuary.

What happens in the study outside seeps into the sanctuary. The human soul has no mechitzah. The rabbi's study is no hermetically sealed cloister. From Selichot on through Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur the prayers cry out for forgiveness; slach lanu, m'chal lanu, kaper lanu -- forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement. On these Days of Awe I come to ask forgiveness. In the tradition of our faith, I do not ask forgiveness for some original sin, some inherited depravity, for some spiritual stain that has infected my soul at birth and to expiate for a sinful strain of chromosome that can be traced back to Adam and Eve. I inherit no original sin.

But I have my own.

But our tradition knows that I am not perfect. I am not unblemished, flawless. I have sins to confess and for which I seek forgiveness.

The Jewish view of human nature is expressed in the Bible in the book of Ecclesiastes 7:20. "There is no human being on earth who has done good and has not sinned."

Next week I will come with you to the synagogue to spend 24 hours in fasting and personal repentance to seek forgiveness and to confess. I will not hide my own transgressions behind the skirts of the community. I will not disguise my own transgressions behind the syntax of plurality "We have sinned. We have transgressed." No, I have sinned. I have transgressed. I have hurt. I have injured. I have gossiped. I have libeled. I have lost my temper. I have manipulated. I have been implacable, stubborn, obdurate, proud, unforgiving, jealous, envious, petty.

On Yom Kippur I hold up a mirror to my inner soul. Ten times I will recite the Al Chet, ten times in the course of Yom Kippur. I will recite the Al Chet not only in public aloud but also in private, in silence when no one is to hear my confession except me and my God. Why Al Chet in private?

I can fool you. I can fool my family. I can fool my friends. I can fool my community. But I cannot fool the silent dialogue within called "vidui," the confession between me and my God. I can find all kinds of excuses for my personal transgressions, for my pride and arrogance. I can blame my background, my parents, my upbringing. But a mirror ritual law of confession states that when you recite the Al Chet you are to stand upright on your own two feet. You cannot lean upon the lectern or table.

I am here to ask forgiveness from God. That God in our tradition, does not want my suffering, my sickness or my death. A rabbinic Midrash tells of the evil king Menasheh who placed a pagan idol in the Temple of the Lord. When that king Menasheh came to pray for forgiveness to ask for tshuvah, the angels protested "Should a person as evil as this man be able to repent? And they locked up all the windows and doors to heaven. What did God do? God dug out a small hole beneath the throne of glory in order to hear the repentance of king Menasheh. God breaks down the mechitzah between you and Him.

God atones. God pardons. God forgives! God! God! God! And me, whom do I forgive?

And you, whom do you forgive? Or do we think that forgiveness is only God's affair? Do we think that the Al Chet runs only vertically, from up to down? But the Talmud won't allow that! "Those transgressions between God and the individual, the Day of Atonement atones for; but those transgressions between the individual and his/her fellow human being, the Day of Atonement does not forgive, unless one personally appeases the other and seeks forgiveness."

Is prayer only vertical -- up/down, down--up? Is it only God who forgives? only God who must understand? only God who can pardon?

Is this the shrewd way I learn to segregate God from my world? Is this the way I draw a horizontal mechitzah between heaven and earth keeping God out of my world?

That's our trick, keep it vertical. If prayer, repentance, forgiveness are only vertical, then all acts are in God's court. No wonder prayer appears irrelevant; it has nothing to do with me. No wonder I am bored by the length of the service and the ten fold litany of the Al Chet; it's all about God, not me.

If I treat prayer only vertically, up down, all I really need to do is to praise God above, to cheer Him on, praise the Lord, Hallelujah. God You are merciful, You are kind, You are slow to anger, You are compassionate. God, You take care of it. God, You make peace. "You've got the whole world in Your hands." Me? I daven, I fast, I sit in my seat. I am an innocent bystander! I'm God's cheer-leader.

But in Judaism we know better. The purpose of prayer is not the adulation of God but the imitation of God, not the admiration of God but the emulation of God's ways. God is the ideal, the model to be emulated by me in my life horizontally, between me and you, and my family and friends—brother, sister, son, daughter. The rabbis spelled out the moral correlation, "As God is merciful, be thou merciful. As God is compassionate, be thou compassionate. As God forgives, you, forgive." Between God and you, there is a moral correlation.

But you know, when I come to services, I'm not moved, I don't experience God. How do you experience God? How do you experience God's love, Gods forgiveness?

How do we experience that God forgives? Because we forgive. How do you experience God's love? When you love. What does it mean to believe that God is moved by our prayers? When we are moved.

Are you moved to act? Will you leave the synagogue changed? Or will you leave here the same way you entered? Same seats!!

Same row! Immovable, unchanged, implacable, immutable. Will you forgive?

Poor innocent naive rabbi, do you know what he did to me? what she said, what they plotted? How can I forgive?

But dear friend are you yourself so perfect beyond reproach? Are you beyond criticism? How do you appeal to God? Yet knowing your faults and transgressions, you still manage to ask God to forgive and pardon you? And the other, is he so irremediably evil, so damnable? How can you ask God to bend while you yourself remain stiff, judgmental, unyielding?

Dear naive innocent cloistered rabbi, you ask forgiveness but how can I forget what he-she-they did or said? But hold on, dear friend, did anyone ever ask you to forget? Did Torah ask you to design a willful amnesia? What has forgiveness got to do with forgetting?

Does Judaism ask for forgetting? Where is it written that when God forgives your sin He thereby forgets your sin? Judaism is a reality based faith. To forgive is not to forget: to forgive is to be liberated from the inner anger, from the quest for vengeance that consumes your life and embitters the life of your family. To forgive is not to forget. No one expects you to forget. No one believes that forgiveness eliminates the memory of the pain and anguish of the injury.

A rabbinic sage explained, sin is like pounding nails into a wooden chest. And repentance and forgiveness is like removing the nails from the wooden chest. The nail may be removed but the hole remains. The nail can be removed but the scar does not disappear.

Forgiveness is not amnesia. Time is irreversible. You cannot turn back the clock. Forgiveness does not reverse the past but it promises a new and different outcome. When you forgive, when you seek reconciliation, things may never be as they were before the injury. But you can establish a new relationship, a speaking civil relationship. Through forgiveness you don't eliminate the holes, but you can remove the nails that tear at the soul of your being and tear your families apart. Anger consumes you. You are master of your fate and fashioner of your life.

What have you and I learned all these years from the readings of the Torah? You know it. Consider the book of Genesis. It is filled with sibling rivalry, hatreds between parents and children. What did the rabbis choose for us to study on the first day of Rosh Hashanah? Mother Sarah and father Abraham cast out Hagar and her son Ishmael into the desert. But note well, the angel of God does not abandon Hagar or Ishmael. God plays no favorites. Follow what happens at the funeral? "And Abraham expired and his sons Isaac and Ishmael came to the funeral and buried him in the cave of Machpelah." Then the Bible goes on to list the names of the children of Ishmael, the grandchildren of Abraham. Who is right and who is wrong? Sarah or Hagar? Abraham or Ishmael? Who cares? There is something sacred that transcends the quarrel and brings them to the funeral as brothers. It's Papa's funeral. How will we honor him? By breaking up his family? By not speaking to each other? It's our son's Bar Mitzvah. It's our daughter's wedding.

Shall we play out our wars on the souls of our children?

Jacob and Esau: Was Jacob right or Esau right? Were their parents who played the dangerous game of favoritism right or wrong?

Was father Isaac right when he loved Esau or mother Rebecca wrong when she loved Jacob? Who knows the motives and origins of the sibling rivalry? But when the boys, Jacob and Esau, after they exiled each other, now meet each other, Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him and they wept. Who was right and who was wrong? Isaac or Rebecca?

Jacob or Esau? Who cares? We are brothers, children of the same womb, sons of the same father. What is important is the victory of reconciliation and the possibility of transformation. What is important is not to dwell obsessing on the recriminations of the past, but on the opportunities of a better year. How shall we honor our parents, by warring with their children?

How is this family web of pain resolved? Turn to the concluding chapter of Genesis. And Joseph was favored by Jacob with a coat of many colors. And the brothers sold him into Egypt as a slave. And Joseph rose to high position in Egypt and the brothers who sought food appear before him and did not know that it was Joseph. Now Joseph could get even with his brothers. He could realize his revenge and make them pay for their betrayal. Let them grovel before him. But Joseph could not refrain himself.

"I am Joseph. Does my father live? And he fell upon his brother Benjamin and wept aloud." Who was right and who was wrong?

Should I speak of reconciliation not speak of Rwanda or Ireland or India and Pakistan, or [Sharon] and Arafat. Would it not be nobler to speak of global issues, international concerns? There is a time for that. But let's not eclipse the local, the domestic, the personal affairs; let's not avoid our wars, our conflicts, our responsibilities.

What is asked of me, you, us on Rosh Hashanah before Yom Kippur?

Seize the sanctity of this moment. Break the impasse. Break down the anger. Break through the stubbornness. Overcome the ugliness of past history. Open your heart, open your mouth. Initiate the first call. Initiate the first piercing of the wall of silence.

Reconcile. Maybe it's a better term than forgiveness. Seek to reconcile. Bend.

Bend! Dare to bend. The curvature of the Shofar is kafuf, it is bent, to teach us to bend our stubbornness and our pride. The sound of the Shofar includes shevarim, the sobbing staccato of broken notes to remind you that tshuvah, repentance, the road to reconciliation is a process, a series of steps. The sound of the Shofar is broken for in God's eye nothing is more whole than a broken heart.

What is asked of us during these 10 days of tshuvah --change. Take yourself seriously. The power of reconciliation is in your hands, in your heart, in your mouth to do it.

There's a humorous Yiddish folk anecdote that illustrates the importance of truth and reciprocity in reconciliation. Joe met Harry in the foyer of the synagogue and said "I bear you no grudge, Harry. For this coming New Years, I wish you what you wish me." "So Joe, you're starting up again?"

Take it seriously. Tshuvah is about dying, like the white kittel is about shrouds. Let the old self die so that a new self may be born.

Reconciliation is hard. It requires a measure of heroism and sacrifice. Sacrifice is always associated with atonement. In ancient times and in modern times, there is always sacrifice attached to atonement and reconciliation. Sacrifice. Love costs. Forgiveness costs. Reconciliation costs. Peace costs. Family costs. Swallow your pride. Bury your stubbornness. Sacrifice.

It carries risk. What if the person you seek to appease doesn't answer, remains obdurate? The sage Maimonides in the Mishnah

Torah urges us to seek appeasement again, again and again. And if the other remains stubborn after three attempts, only then may you leave him alone. The one who refuses to reconcile is now the sinner. He is achzor, cruel. It is forbidden to be obdurate. One must be easy to pacify and find it difficult to become angry.

Why have I chosen Rosh Hashanah to speak about Yom Kippur? To give us time.

Because Rosh Hashanah prepares us for Yom Kippur. I want to give ourselves time, during these 10 Days of Repentance to enter

Yom Kippur with a pure heart and a clear conscience.

I chose to speak of reconciliation on Rosh Hashanah because Rosh Hashanah is prologue to the Day of Atonement, the Day of healing and of moral courage. The courage to take the first step, to say the first word, to fall on the neck of the other and to weep. I am sorry. I miss you. My children miss you. I miss my family. I miss you, my friend. Let us begin a year of goodness. I do not want us to visit our angers on our children and children's children. Save the family. Save your life.

There is suffering out there, man-made suffering, anger, resentment, loneliness, and we can remove it. There are human wounds out there, and we can bind them.

You can make a difference in shalom bayit. No one can serve as your intermediary. It is up to you. You can demonstrate to yourself and to your children the power, meaning and relevance of Judaism. Through prayer, repentance and acts of kindness, you and I can remove the sadness of the evil decree. You are teacher. You are transmitters of family values. When you gird your loins and seek reconciliation you teach your family that Judaism is real, that it makes a difference. You teach that prayer can transform.

Don't waste the sanctity of the High Holy Day. Don't leave the synagogue the way you entered it. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur without internal change is no service to God and no honor to our people. Seek reconciliation. Let there be "tshuvah mahavah".

I ask of you and myself courage.

These Days of Awe require personal courage, personal reconciliation. What is Jewish heroism? Our sages said, Who is the hero?

He who makes an enemy into a friend, an adversary into an ally. You can find a hundred reasons for not reaching out. But outreach—keruv begins now, with me. Close your Prayer Book. Get out of your pews. Look into the eyes of the other -- Papa, Mama, son, daughter, brother, sister, friend. Did we not hear the same song and prayers today, the words of the prophet Jeremiah?

"Is not Ephraim my beloved son, my beloved child? Even when I speak against him, I remember him with affection. Therefore my heart yearns for him. I will surely have compassion." Extend your hand, embrace the other.

Heal the pain! The services are not over with the singing of Adon Olam. The true service begins when you come home and look at the mezuzah on your doorpost. God forgives. God seeks reconciliation. Dare we not?

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page

A Day Made for Apologizing
by Emily Feigenson

One morning, my three-year-old daughter, Netanya, and I had our first real fight. I can’t recall what it was about, no doubt I was tired, but by 8:30 in the morning my buttons had been pushed. As I drove her to preschool, I did something I had never done before. I shut her out. She was kind of chattering in back, knowing I was angry and so trying to engage me. I said, "Netanya, I don’t want to talk now, I am very angry." She persisted with a series of questions, and I persisted too, saying, "Netanya, I’m not talking now." We arrived at the preschool in stony silence.

As we walked up toward the building, I pulled myself together. I asked her to wait a minute. I took a deep breath. I leaned down, trying to relax my shoulders and said:

"Do you know what, Netanya? I think we just had our first fight, a fight with each other. And when two people have a fight, they can end it by both of them saying that they are sorry."

"So, I want to tell you that I am sorry for being so angry with you, I want to explain that I got angry when you were not co-operating with me. But I am sorry for getting so angry with you."

Netanya said nothing, but stayed close. Then I said, "Now, Netanya, it’s your turn to say you are sorry."

And she said: "But I don’t want to say I am sorry."

That gave me pause. I said, "Well, we are still in a fight then."

She gave it a moment’s consideration, smiled, and looked up at me. Cuddling a bit closer she said, "I’m sorry, Mommy."

From this I learned two things: First, I learned that my daughter, Netanya, is no fool. And second, I realized that I had written a script in my mind about how this little apology scene ought to play out; I became aware of it only when she didn’t follow my script.

This is the first of the Aseret Yamei T’shuvah—ten days of reconciiation--between parents and children, between husband and wife, between siblings, colleagues and friends.

This morning I want to speak with you about two normal human tendencies that frustrate our ability to reconcile: the first is this business of scripts, of preconceived pictures or ideas of how an apology ought to play out. Obviously it’s not easy to reconcile: even with a two- and-a-half-year-old, my script was not followed.

Scripts can inhibit us from focusing on the times we have harmed someone accidentally or not--and moving beyond the words in our head to try to actually apologize.

What are those wrongs we are asked to redress? Whose words went unheard, or ignored? From whom have we stolen time, or money? Whose dignity have I denied? Whose self-respect have I trampled? Whose feelings counted less than our daily things-to-do- list? And whose feelings, needs, and yearnings did not make that list at all? These form our personal vidui, our personal confession.

This day is made for apologizing for these simple acts.

I say simple, not because they are easy to think about, and not because they are easy to address; but there are other, deeper, more entrenched rifts in some relationships. Some resentments are so strong that families carry them to the graveside.

At a funeral recently, I met two brothers who were enmeshed in a lifetime of jealousy. As mature adults, they had fought over the care of their aging and ailing mother. Now, they fought over funeral arrangements for her. They stood side by side, with the podium and spouses carefully in-between them. At kriah --as they tore those small black ribbons of mourning, they were careful not to allow their eyes to meet, not to let their shoulders to touch. Nor did they speak after the earth covered their loved one and they walked away.

In these last few months I have encountered three separate families that carried these kinds of feelings to the burial of a parent. Many of you probably know of such deep divides within a family: of siblings, fighting. Or a son or daughter whose companion at graveside is fury--only fury and pain.

What causes these hurts so deep, so achingly deep? Was it when a son or daughter chooses a spouse, against a parent’s wishes? Or a career? Or a way of life--either too religious of not religious enough? When single parents remarry, making their adult choices against the cries or wishes of their children, whether those offspring be ten-years old, or twenty or thirty?

At one time, in the past, whenever the events occurred, the hurt was real. The disappointment was real then, or the fear of abandonment, or even actual abandonment may have been real then .... But need it be now? Need it continue into this New Year? Those we love may make their life decisions in a manner that is hurtful, they may make lousy decisions, in fact ... but the hurt was then... must it go on, unabated, now?

For this deep kind of hurt, this day was made.

We gather here in this big lovely room, row upon row. The room faces front, as if that is where the action is, when in reality, at this point in this holiday all the action is not up here, where I am--it is inside--inside each of us.

So what is going on inside? Is it t’shuvah--a real turning--a real repentance? Or are we each writing a sort of script, to be enacted only in our imaginations while the cantor sings, or the rabbi talks? To be edited, and refined while driving home, or, having returned home, sitting each in their own house?

Some here may imagine approaching someone with an explanation followed by swift apology, the apology is graciously accepted, and we are embraced without a glitch.

Wasn’t this my little script, with Netanya?

Sitting quietly here are those who are deeply aware of a shortcoming, of a time they regret. Their hearts feel a deep yearning to apologize, but they are inhibited. They are all too able to vividly imagine that their apology may be met with stony silence, with some form of "I’m not talking now."

With us in this room sits so much fear. So much anger. So many words imagined, rehearsed, but unspoken.

While these scenes play out in our minds, we sit isolated, as if in a darkened theater, not speaking to each other. Not listening to each other. Perhaps we are sitting right next to someone ... a family member, a friend ... maybe they are down a row or across the aisle. Someone who is also filled with his or her own imaginings.

It seems that as soon as we try to think about who we have hurt, one of two things happen: we either fill up with words in our minds about how or whether to apologize and speculations about how it might go. Or maybe even more frequently, we are distracted by the flip side of this coin: who wronged ME, who hurt ME, who owes ME an apology. This is the second, most natural human dynamic which ultimately distracts us from our tradition’s challenge and so I want to spend a little bit of time on it right now.

As we sit trying to think of what WE have done that caused harm, there may arise in each of us a voice-our childlike voice, of "hey, what about ME," what’s owed to me, why don’t they come to me?

And this is the most distracting script of all, is it not? Imagining with crystal clarity the person who has hurt us, coming to us and apologizing, and asking for OUR forgiveness.

A delicious thought, yes? We roll it around inside to savor its taste and HOW does this script end in your heart? Like an interactive theater we can shape the ending according to our whim, our mood of the moment. Today, we imagine that we will be graciously forgiving, but tonight, we can give way to the vengeful fantasy of being stern and cold, turning them away, making them come to us again.

Rabbi Harold Kushner illustrates this ultimately self-defeating dynamic, and shows us that there are dire consequences that come from dwelling too long on the hurt that others have inflicted, particularly at this time of year. He tells this story:

A few weeks before the holidays, I was teaching about t’shuvah, about the process of repentance. After the session, a congregant asked to speak with me privately, someone whom the I had known well for many years. She was a single mother whom I will call ‘Sara.’ Sara came in and sat down.

With tension and strain and a deep anger in her voice she said: "Rabbi, you talk of forgiveness. How can I forgive my ex-husband, who humiliated me, who left me, who does not help with the care of our children?"

I responded quietly and gently. I leaned forward and said: "Sara, I was there with you during the break up of your marriage. While I don’t know your entire story, I have seen some of the pain and difficulty and the way you have carried on. But let me tell you this Sara: It is as if the day he left, you picked up a hot, burning coal, and held it in your hand ready to hurl it at him upon his return. And for all these years, you have gripped that burning coal of anger in your hand and in your heart, while your husband is living in a different state, making a new life for himself.

"Sara, put down that coal."

How can we let go of that coal? Of those old angers that consume us?

Could this be the day, the first day of the New Year, when we push aside these scripts that play in our mind, to break out of our dark isolation, and instead speak to each other? Listen to the other? Isn’t this the place, our bet knesset, that might enable us to make peace with others, to make peace with ourselves?

So how can we put down those coals?

We can’t let go of old hurts by focusing on them directly-just as one can’t look at the sun directly-it is too hot, way too hot. Instead, we need to turn ourselves away from our own hurts, our own wounds, and instead turn ourselves toward examining those times we have hurt others, those times we missed the mark. Those times that we thought we understood what was going on and what needed to be done-when now we realize that we didn’t understand at all. With these insights, we begin the traditional task of apology, of amends, of making peace where we inflicted harm. And if we do this with sincerity, what do we get? We are given a dose of humility.

Simple humility. Some people give honey cake on Rosh Hashanah, and others give cards. But the real gift of this season that we give ourselves is a pathway to humility.

It comes with an honest review of how we hurt others, and it is this humility that can help us let go of our own deep pains.

This is a practical aid in letting go of old injuries. This process of t’shuvah-of looking at how we treated others forms a miraculous cycle of healing precisely because it shakes us up, and enables us to let go of the hurt, the resentment, the righteous indignation that we hold, that we may have rehearsed -said over and over again in our hearts for far too long.

We are quite a species! Capable of such complex feelings, of hurt and resentment and rationalization! And capable of reviewing our lives from a later, more mature perspective. And isn’t this what makes it so special to be human? That in our later years we gain insight into our earlier, growing stages? A teenager sees his childhood in new ways, or at least we hope so. A new parent reflects on her mother and father with new insight. Throughout life, we are given this marvelous ability to re-examine the past from a more mature vantage point. For this, this day is made.

We have this gift with us at all times but we are urged to use it during this holy season. We stand in the front of a New Year, and look back on the last year and I can tell you that for me, its been quite a year! I’ve had three children under the age of three, and that experience has given me a new way to see my own old hurts. One obvious example: in the fatigue of mothering three children under the age of three, I have understood anew my own parents’ weariness when I was a child. I’m sure this is an insight that many of you encountered before me.

Although our twins, Gabriel and Tali, have given me much pleasure, I must say that it is from my little Netanya that I have learned more of life’s lessons.

When Netanya yelps that she wants to do it herself, when she has a temper tantrum because I pushed the elevator button instead of letting her do it and she is so busy crying that I can’t calm her, can’t lift her up to do it over again ... I sigh. I recall times when I’ve complained that I didn’t get help and guidance. Now I can admit that precisely those times when I most needed guidance, I was most resistant to receiving it. My child wants to do it all by herself: to dress, to cat, and to make pancakes. I look at this youth and smile. And so it is from this vantage point that I can admit that my fear that I won’t be able to handle everything is born from my own false script that I have to handle everything on my own.

I need to get rid of that script.

On Rosh Hashanah, I sigh, and quietly admit that some of the times that I have felt lonely in life were born from my own insistence on being alone.

Seeing my own old grievances and my misdeeds with new insight: it is a humbling experience. I don’t let humility in so easily. I fight it tooth and nail, but on this day, somehow humility seeps into the cracks and nooks of our souls.

And this humility gives us the strength to be a little weak, and so to turn to the other, and speak simply. To admit that we don’t have the words, we don’t have a script in front of us, we don’t know how this conversation will end, but now is a time to begin to speak. Now is the time to move out of dark isolation and to draw near to those in our lives.

This is why Judaism insists we spend today looking at our own misdeeds. This process shakes us up. We emerge less sure of ourselves, less sure of our grip on everything. And so we are able to open up, and to let go of old angers, to loosen our grip, and let that hot coal fall away.

These are some of my tales; each of you has your own. We clumsily stumble like a toddler from one stage of life to another.

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page

An Old Question - Revisited
by Richard Wolberg

I heard something as a child that I never forgot and is as fresh in my mind today as it was when I was 11 or so.

If you were asked why do you dip the apple in honey on Rosh Hashanah your answer would probably be "to have a
sweet year" -- obviously one of the many symbolisms of religion.

Then I would ask you: Why honey, why not anything else sweet such as maple syrup or sugar, etc..

The answer I heard as a boy was so fascinating and was actually incorporated into a sermon by the late Abraham N. AvRutick tz"l of Hartford, Conn.

Do you know how honey is produced? The bee has to work and work and work very hard. It goes from flower to flower, all day, day after day. What is its lesson? If you want a sweet (and good) year, you have to work for it! You have to labor like the bee. It doesn't just happen by dipping an apple into something sweet or hoping for it. You must make it work -- like the bee.

* * * * *

My good friend Rabbi Weinberg asked me an interesting question (as a follow up to above).

Israel is referred to as the land of "milk and honey." Now milk is unique because it comes from a meat cow, yet it has opposite properties. Honey is even stranger because it emanates from a non-kosher insect, yet it is kosher. So why "milk and honey"?

I thought that was very interesting and my answer to him was the following:

It is not so important where something comes from -- what's more important is where it is going and how it is utilized.

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page

The Circle of Life
by Edgar Weinsberg

Rosh Hashanah - Newletter Article

I am not a big animated cartoon fan, but a couple of years ago, I, along with millions of other adults, could not help but be thrilled with Disney’s epic "The Lion King." What wasn’t to like, given the vivid graphics - employing a whole spectrum of colors; stirring music; and delightful theatrical voice-overs by some of today’s leading actors.

More than that, here was a great story about a family and the "growing pains" of its precocious youngster, - the son of the Lion King and his heir apparent. The plot was suitable for "children" of all ages, alternating between birth and death, horror and humor, mourning and celebration.

The appeal of this marvelous work of cinematography also emanated from its depiction about evil. Its protagonist initially knows no fear. Then he succumbs to evil. Eventually he overcomes cowardice and learns to look evil in the eye without even flinching. The kind of evil we’re talking about is evil in its most pernicious form: namely hatred between brothers, which becomes so intense it ultimately gives way to the crime of fratricide.

These are the eternal conflicts that have plagued humanity from the outset, ever since Cain and Abel. This theme recurs in the story of the conflict between Jacob’s eleven sons and their brother Joseph with his amazing technicolored dreamcoat, as was recently depicted in theaters around the country.

So it is that in viewing the feature-length cartoon, we find ourselves in fact looking in a mirror that reflects the image of ourselves at our best and at our worst.

All in all, then, the "Lion King" is a story about us. It describes the "Circle of Life", as embodied in its theme song and in the narrative that unfolds before our eyes.

With Rosh Hashanah we renew the circle or cycle of life, as we count anew from the beginning of months on the Jewish calendar. Like boxers, we know that even after the "knockouts" we may have suffered this past year, the new year gives us a new chance to show that we can renew ourselves as we get back on our feet again. It is hardly coincidental, then, that while "Rosh Hashanah" literally means "The beginning of the year," its etymology stems from the Hebrew word "shanah" or "cycle".

Judaism teaches us to renew the ourselves not only annually, but daily. In the words of the Jewish prayer book: "God in His goodness renews creation every day." This theme is underscored at this season by the blowing of the shofar or ram’s horn, - arguably Judaism’s most powerful symbol. With Rosh Hashanah we acknowledge that God is far more than the "King of the Beasts." He is the Universal King, as well as the Creator and Redeemer. By the same token with the High Holydays we acknowledge that God has imbued us with some of His creative powers that can help us shape the new year for the better.

May the sound of the shofar, like the roar of the Lion King, awaken us and reinvigorate our lives not just once a year but from day to day. If this occurs, the circle of life will be renewed daily for us and for everyone we love.

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page

The Torah and the Shofar
by David Geffen

The notes of the Shofar beckon to each of us as we assemble here today on this second day of Rosh Hashanah. Yesterday Joe Hodin sounded the shofar, today H.P. Baker is our Baal Tokea. We listened closely to both of them.

"We have been awakened," Rabbi Max Arzt wrote, "by the awesome tekiah sounds powerful alarm going off. This is followed by the three plaintive shevarim. Then the nine stoccato teruah notes call us to attention.

Lastly, we are lifted to the heights of hope as we hear the tekiah gedolah, the prolonged concluding blast."

Yes, each one of the notes of the shofar has its own message. Moreover, in the words of the composer Handel, in his Oratorio entitled, Judas Maccabeus, each note "Sounds An Alarm." In order to focus on the varied meanings of that "alarm," let us turn to the Ark where our Scrolls of the Torah are housed.

To define more clearly, on this eighth day after the terrorist attack, what the "alarms" that are going off, let us symbolically open the Torah and search through it for messages which may be of assistance.

The late Morris Adler, noted rabbi, great thinker and a Shofar like person in his own right, was the only rabbi ever to be assassinated in a United States pulpit. He wrote the following about the meaning of the Torah.

"Torah is the ladder by which the Jew seeks to ascend to God. It is the bridge he builds between himself and humanity.

Torah is the worship of God by means of study. It is man’s pilgrimage through life in search of himself.

Torah is the tree of life and in its shade above can the Jew find completeness, peace and serenity."

The Torah transmits its lessons through study and inquiry. The shofar, however, is a "spiritual alarm clock" to arouse us out of our "apathy, and our lethargy and our indifference."

Our shofar wakes us up, but to what? Let me offer some answers by pointing to a few of the words, phrases, passage books underwritten by individuals and families for our new Torah.

How appropriate that the First Book of the Temple Israel Torah to be dedicated was Bereshit-Genesis. For all Americans, for all the world, the coming days must make each of us search for a new Bereshit, a new beginning. This is a most critical turning point in human history and we must decide in which direction we will move. Our personal decisions will ultimately influence our national leaders.

One word chosen for dedication was "ahava" - "love." This word was a gift to a young couple getting married. Rightfully we all think, myself included, that the expression of love and the feeling of love should come naturally. The shofar’s sounds this year tragically remind us of one of the most horrific tragedies in history, and of man’s inhumanity to his fellow human beings. Where has "ahava" love gone?

Fortunate is the individual who has experienced the miracle of true love.

It is the miracle of the soul which has won him over; one soul clinging to another, one heart beating to the rhythm of another heart, one life blended into another."

On this Rosh Hashanah, emphasize "ahava" - love in your lives.

The second gift word which was presented to a person with a special birthday, was "chayim" - life. The shofar sounds remind us that in the Hebrew word "chayim," we have "chet" and "mem" on the two ends which mean "warmth" and two "yods" in the middle, which form the name of God. How do we seek the warmth which God can give us in life? How do we strive to acquire this feeling?

Alas, at times we wait too long to discipline ourselves and to take charge of our lives. We feed ourselves the vain delusion that it will be easier to uproot tomorrow the tyranny and terror which sadly may destroy us.

We wait too long to speak the words of forgiveness that should be spoken, to set aside the hatreds that should be banished? How often do we express thanks, give encouragement? How often do we offer comfort? These quotes are from the letters written by children in the Hebrew School to the De Fazio family, whose daughter was killed.

How blessed we are that we do have the opportunity to experience certain key aspects of life. Remind yourselves of these events in contrast to the tragedies we have witnessed over and over again on TV in the last 8 days.

Fortunate is the individual who has seen a new life born. He who has seen birth cannot ever deny the reality of the miracle of a life formed from a tiny seed. He cannot help but open his heart and his mind to the words of the Psalmist: "I will give thanks unto Thee, O Lord, for that which is wonderfully made."

Fortunate is the individual who has seen day change into night, for he can now meditate on the mystery of time. He realizes that when God said: "Let there be light," that God did not mean it for only one time and place. The miracle of creating darkness and sunlight God performs every evening and every morning, just as He performs the miracles of creating new flowers, new trees, new animals, new human beings.

Life is the beautiful diamond we each possess. Let us constantly discover within it the many facets it contains.

One special passage endowed in the new Torah now being written is the Shema, the watchword of our people. This prayer taken from the Book of Deuteronomy begins with word Shema, translated as "hear" and "listen." There are some unique ways to "hear" and "listen."

In Los Angeles is a congregation of hearing impaired Jews which has an unusual way of handling the shofar service. The bracha recited here only a few minutes ago before the sounding of the shofar, said, "Blessed are You, O Lord our God, who hallows us with mitzvot and calls us to hear the sound of the shofar."

The resourceful rabbi in L.A. interpreted the blessing as follows. "Blessed are You, O God, who has commanded us to heed the call and feel the vibrations of the shofar." He then walked into the congregation and invited the worshippers to hold the shofar and vibrate with its reverberations, as he blew it.

Some congregants placed their hands at the mouth of the shofar and felt the air emanating from it. Others embraced the shofar’s body literally and "listened from head to toe."

To heed the shofar’s call and to make the Torah our "tree of life," its teachings must touch us from "head to toe." When we grasp hold of the "tree of life," then we will find completeness, peace and serenity.

When we combine the message of the Torah and the sounds of shofar, we discover how much more we can do with our lives. Never forget that the Torah is written without vowels because God calls upon us to supply the vowels, form the words and thus enunciate its eternal message to the world.

Our genes may determine whether our eyes are blue or brown, but whether we look upon each other with cold indifference or warm compassion is for us to choose.

Our passions, appetites and instincts are part of our make-up, but whether they rule us or we rule them is left for each of us to determine. Even the sacred can become profane. Too much faith sadly can turn one into a monster, an extremist who kills. What a vast number of choices we have to make on this Rosh Hashanah 5762.

Each week Rita has a ritual which she observes religiously. As she waters her plants, many of which sit on the kitchen window sill facing our front porch, she rotates each of them. In this way, she guarantees that both sides of her plants receive the same amount of light so they will not grow too far in one direction.

That is what the compelling rays of the Torah and the moving sounds of the shofar are meant to do for us. Teshuva, repentance, is turning ourselves around 180 degrees. On Rosh Hashanah we each rearrange ourselves at the start of the New Year. We listen to the notes of the shofar and the words of the Torah. As we do, we can make sure that we are not over exposed in one direction.

As I stand before you today I urge you to take to heart the message from the Torah "chai bahem-live by them." Usually the "them" are just the mitzvot. Now as the world has changed so we have to fashion the new rules by which we can live.

As the shofar "sounds the alarm, and awakens us," let each of us resonate with it, raise ourselves to a new level of existence which can benefit ourselves, our people, our nation, and all the world.

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page

Returning Home
by Bernard P. King

Like some of you, I have a terrible sense of direction. Five years of living in the same home has not precluded my driving periodically into the wrong driveway. On our living room wall now hangs a photograph of a World War Il vintage diesel powered submarine. The sub was my home at sea for two years from 1956-1958. The Peter Principle of rising to one’s level of incompetence was alive and well on the United States submarine of 30 + years ago. The job to which I rose on that boat? Quartermaster. I was one of those responsible for keeping our coarse logged on charts. Without my plotting periodic fixes on a chart, we would not know where we were.

One evening we were operating outside of San Diego, off the Baja coastline. As my watch was ending, I aimed the periscope toward three points and recorded their bearings. My replacement relieved me of the watch and said that he would plot my fix on the chart. As I began to descend down the conning tower ladder, I heard a gasp and yell. The poor guy replacing me plotted my fix on the chart only to find us on dry land in the center of Tijuana. No, the sub was not grounded in Tijuana. I had erred in my recording of the numbers, leading to a mistaken fix on the map. My sense of direction has not improved measurably since those days long ago. I pray that the military now uses better judgment in assigning personnel to the function of quartermaster.

My wife, Barbara, thank God, has a marvelous sense of direction which accounts for my arrival at Temple for services, hotels for weddings and sadly, mortuaries for funerals. A homing pigeon, I am not. The instinct of a salmon swimming upstream to spawn or a swallow returning to Capistrano fills me with admiration.

A year or two ago, Barbara bought me a birthday present-one of those Casio watches with dials that move for a variety of aquatic reasons that leave me still puzzled. But one instrument I use daily--the compass. I am often asked by people who notice my watch if I am a diver. I am usually tempted to answer "Yes" and let it go at that, but I find myself saying "No, I am not a diver. I use the compass to help me direct my prayers eastward, toward Jerusalem." People usually smile quizzically, turn away, and begin talking to someone else.

For years now, I have followed the traditional practice of praying three times a day in the direction of Jerusalem. Prior to my Casio watch compass, I seldom could figure out where the east was. At such moments I comforted myself with the Kabbalistic knowledge that God was beyond space and time anyway. Yet, since acquiring the compass, I sense that my prayers are now more readily accepted. Besides, a reform Jew who prays three times a day needs a sense of humor, if not a sense of direction.

On these Holy Days of Awe and Wonder, we are bidden to turn the direction of our lives around and return home to where our heart and soul are. T’shuvah, repentance, is better rendered in its root meaning of "return." It was understood long ago at the foot of Mt. Sinai, if not before, that each of us, spiritually, has problems with a sense of direction. Constantly getting lost, taking dead-end roads on the path of life, seems to be the human condition. How do we know when we are lost or facing the wrong direction on a dead-end road? The compass deep inside our neshuma lets us know. Irrespective of how "together" we may appear to others, aside from the vehicles we command down. the impressive highways upon which others see us, inside we often feel lost, out of sync, out of harmony with some center of grounding. In short, something inside lets us know that our inner compass has gone awry.

Do t’shuvah, these "Days of Awe," whisper in our hearts: Turn around, return to your more real, finer self?

Is it true that we can never go home again? Once we set out from that place of our beginnings, are we doomed to wander, rootless, on the highways and byways of life?

One of my earlier memories of growing up in San Francisco’s Richmond district, was a song. You all know it, but for me it has always been, and now is even more special. As Mom lay dying in a Long Beach hospital room, we held her hand and sang to her "Shalom Alechem," "Sim Shalom," "V’Shamru" and other Cantor Arie melodies that had become so precious to Mom over the years. But, I was not always a Rabbi and Hebrew songs were not the only songs of my early San Francisco childhood.

As I held Mom’s hand near the very end, I sang a chorus of "Show Me the Way to Go Home." Mom and her best friend, an Arab Christian named Marie Khoury, spent countless New Year Eves and family celebrations together--and after a few "medicinal" shots of schnapps, Marie and Mom would harmonize together:

"Show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I want to go to bed. I had a little drink about an hour ago and it went right to my head. Wherever I may roam, on land or sea or foam, you can always hear me singing this song, show me the way to go home, the way to go home."

It was to be Mom’s final New Year’s Eve--January 1, 1991. The next day she would finally forever be home. She smiled in remembrance as, I sang the words she could only weakly mouth with me. But it was not me with whom Mom harmonized that final day. It was with Marie Khoury and years of San Francisco memories that warmed her final moments.

How do we set our bearings, chart our course, and direct our lives homeward? How do we return home to our finer selves? The primary question we face on these Holy Days! Each of us has been taught the answer and then ‘made to forget it. We all know of the Midrashic legend that probes our experience as fetuses in our Mother’s wombs. An angel teaches us all of Torah’s wisdom. From the moment of conception we learn the deepest mysteries of the universe. Then, at the moment of birth, the angel touches us gently on our upper lip and we immediately forget everything we have been taught. (NID .30b)

Why? To what purpose was the learning which we were made to forget? One commentator likens the situation to the folding of a piece of paper. When it is straightened out, a crease remains so that it is easier to fold anew at the place of the crease. All subsequent learning of Torah’s wisdom is greatly facilitated because all we have to do is return to what we already know deep in our souls. When we return to uncover what is buried subconsciously in our deepest being, we reach a place of truth. Truth is like folding over an old crease. It just feels right--it folds easily.

Not unlike the compasses that guide our ships and help us direct our prayers, there is an inner compass that points us toward four directions to home. An anonymous poet speaks silently from the womb and thunders in a still, small voice from the foot of Sinai: "Look forward and be hopeful. Look backward and be thankful. Look downward and be helpful. Look upward and be humble."

Do t’shuvah--return home by these four inner paths. Look forward with hope-optimism, not despair, is the Jewish way. Having every reason to be cynical, it is forbidden for us to despair. Each day we open our eyes with gratitude to God for returning our life to us for yet another day. The first pathway on our return home lies before us. We face the future with hope. "Od tereh Od tereh kama tov ye-he-yeh . . . " "You will see, you will see, how good it will be during the coming year."

The second path home is backward. We look over our shoulder at our past and say "Baruch HaShem, "Thank God. Thank God for all our experiences that brought us to this moment of hope. There is much in the past of each of us that we would gladly have foregone and have experienced differently if we could. Yet, who we are at this moment is a culmination of everything that has gone on before. Because of our experiences, we either became better or became bitter. It is only when we look backward with gratitude for having grown through and coped with and learned from our experiences, that we realize that everything on some level is for good. If we have become bitter rather than better, then our spiritual work on these Days of Awe is to turn ourselves around and begin to accept who we are and the hope of what we can become. When we can say of all our backward glances, "Baruch HaShem, this also deepened me," then our second path homeward is clear.

Having looked forward with hope and backward with thankfulness, we now enter the third compass point homeward. We look downward and reach out to those who need us. Some look downward and see only the weak and needy, and feel superior or ignore what they see. You can’t return to your spiritual home of harmony and integrity without looking downward and reaching out to share with those who are experiencing loss of money, health or self-esteem. As the Holy Blessed One seeks only to reach downward to us with the tsedakah gift of life and breath, so must we harmonize our lives by emulating the cosmic sharing of the divine. This third path homeward-bound bids us to spend a healthy portion of our time giving, sharing and bringing a measure of hope and gratitude to those who need us.

One more path in our return to the home of our finer, more decent, more menschlicht inner selves! But before we discuss this final path, please allow me a momentary digression into one of my favorite subjects: baseball. As I grow older, I see more and more of a connection between two of the great passions of my life--Judaism and baseball.

I used to be a sports nut. Growing up in San Francisco, I would spend my Sundays during football season selling programs in front of the then home of the San Francisco 49ers, Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate park. I would earn about $7 prior to game time, during which I would sit free in a 50-yard line seat, consume a hot dog and coke, and watch my Frankie Albert-led 49ers be crushed by Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsh’s L.A. Rams or by Otto Graham’s Cleveland Browns. I grew up with Bill Russell and K. C. Jones leading the San Francisco Dons to the NCAA National Basketball Championship. My allegiance over the years switched turncoat fashion to the L.A. Rams and L.A. Lakers. Yet as my beard whitens, I must admit that I enjoy sports less and less, with one notable exception, baseball.

Baseball is unique. Admittedly boring. I have compared it to Judaism. Both are for the most part tedious and unexciting for those ignorant of their finer points. The more one knows about both baseball and Judaism, the more interesting and consuming both become.

Football, hockey, basketball have their passionate fans, but baseball’s fans, I would contend, feel deeper over a longer period.

Just look at the fans of the California Angels or Boston Red Sox to learn something about long suffering.

What makes baseball unique? It is the only sport wherein home holds a mystical meaning. Bart Giamatti, the late Commissioner of Baseball, a brilliant literary scholar and administrator at Yale University, wrote many moving pieces about his lifelong love of baseball. Giamatti sees baseball as representing the human need to leave home, travel-afar and then ultimately to return home once again. He describes the homerun hitter "triumphantly rounding second and returning homeward as a victorious hunter who had faced the dangers of the world at the outer fringes and who was now returning home with his head held high."

"As the batter stands at home plate, he sees the space between the foul lines radiating out, ever wider. This field of dreams allows us constantly to find new areas in which to develop ourselves and use our creativity. Yet the goal of baseball is to venture forth into that ever widening field of life, experience it to its fullest, and then reset our bearings by returning home again.

The compass points to the final path home. Looking forward with hope, and backward with gratitude, and downward to help, we must now shift our glance upward.

Arrogance never brings us wisely or safely home. The final path is to look upward and be humble. To realize that we walk the fields of life with a higher power is the beginning of wisdom. As we return home and the townsfolk begin to sing our praises and give us high-fives, we are bidden to raise our eyes upward and walk humbly with our God. I understand that seeing Lou Gehrig trot around the bases after one of his towering homeruns was a sight to behold. Head bowed in humility, he gracefully rounded the bases toward home. He could ultimately, suffering from a terminal illness, bow his head before a cheering Yankee stadium as he headed toward his final home saying, "I am the luckiest man alive."

Yet sometimes returning home itself can be dangerous. When ego is overriding, one looks up and sees only himself, herself-we become the self-made man who worships his maker.

A final story. This story I have been ashamed to tell my children.

A San Francisco sandlot--a junior high school baseball game--I reached third somehow. Standing at third I imagined myself the hero stealing home. The stands would cheer, my teammates would praise me, my coach would be proud. Thinking only of myself, I waited for the pitcher to look away from me. Then I ran as fast as my feet would carry me toward home plate. Halfway home and still the pitcher didn’t see me--a genuine hero-all I could feel was accolades greeting me in the dugout. Three-quarters of the way and still unnoticed. Finally the pitcher wound up and hurled the ball.

He had never seen me streaking for home--for that matter, neither had my teammate at bat. As I crossed the plate, forgetting to slide, and foolishly standing up, and totally absorbed in myself, the batter swung and came within a hair’s breath of knocking my head off.

Yes, I think I scored--but there were no cheers or shouts of glee--only gasps and disgust on the faces of all, my teammates, my coach, the batter who almost hit me, and the opposing players who laughed mockingly at my stupidity. My coach benched me for thinking only of myself and almost bringing danger to myself and others.

There are ways to do t’shuvah, to return home that are safer and better and less embarrassing than others. Looking up and experiencing humility is the time-tested way of our people to score a run in the game of life. No matter how many runs we, or others, might think we score, with arrogance and selfishness and greed we are more apt to get our heads knocked off where the scoring counts-with our children, our spouses, our friends.

I finished singing, and Mom finished her silent harmonization of "Show Me the Way to Go Home." She smiled and gently squeezed my hand. I knew at that moment that Mom was peacefully home. Abraham Heschel once commented that "when life is an answer, death is a homecoming."

For Mom life was forever an answer--to every question, her life was a smile. For her many friends-Marie, Ann, Gert, Leah and others among you too numerous to name-Mom was always a mensch, always a smile. Mom looked forward and hoped, she looked backward and was thankful, she looked downward and always helped, she looked upward and was ever humble.

During this New Year, may each of us become aware of our own inner compass-it points in four directions around the bases of lifehope, gratitude, helpfulness and humility. The compass leads us safely into our own driveways. The front door opens--a hauntingly familiar melody-wherever I may roam, on land or sea or foam, you can always hear me singing this song, show me the way to go home, the way to go home.

Go to Get-to-the-Point at the top of this page            |            Return to First Page