Yom Kippur Sermon 5781
Rabbis Adam Roffman and Shira Wallach

​With gratitude for the inspiration of our teacher and friend, Dr. Arnold Eisen

Adam: The Friday night before our wedding, Shira berated our guests because they couldn’t count to 6.  
 
We had gathered everyone together for an intimate shabbaton at a retreat center outside Baltimore and, after shabbat dinner, we had an oneg. Some dessert, some wine, an essential ingredient in this story, and, most importantly for us, some singing. 

A half empty bottle of Moscato in her hand, Shira, who cannot hold her liquor, had the brilliant idea that she would teach a complicated three-part round to our assembled guests.
 
We love our friends very much, but let’s be honest: they weren’t exactly up to our high musical standards. And so, a minute or two into the singing, Shira yelled: “STOP! It’s in 6/8 people!” 

In other words: in order not to get lost, you had to count off musical patterns in two groups of three. Which, needless to say, for a well-intentioned group of middling musical talent, resulted in chaos.
 
Shira: It’s been a challenge for us, over these past few months, listening to the broken rhythms of our time. We’re reminded of this every time we hold services on Zoom, a virtual platform on which it is technologically impossible for people, sitting in their own homes, to speak or sing in unison. For the leader of the Mourner’s Kaddish, the experience is even more disorienting. You begin, and then the sound of everyone else returns to you seconds later.
 
For those like Adam and me, who can be particular about how things sound, it’s been like nails on a chalkboard. How are we to make sense of this cacophony, this overlapping jumble of words, when we are supposed to be praying to God and comforting mourners?
 
This experience of saying kaddish is yet another example, of many, of why we are living in a time that has no rhyme or rhythm. It is impossible to predict what will happen and when, impossible to know what to do or how to respond, or if, when we do, it will have any impact at all on the myriad of crises unfolding around us. Put simply, right now, the world makes no sense.
 
Adam: It makes no sense that, in the most advanced age of medicine ever, over 200,000 of our fellow countrymen and women have died in a pandemic that has ravaged the world. 

It makes no sense that, in the streets of our cities and towns, people are turning on one another, fighting and screaming and shouting, looting and burning, each side claiming the moral high ground. 

It makes no sense that people are forced to choose between their health and their livelihood, between keeping their children at home or sending them to school, when both seem like a losing proposition. 

It makes no sense that after nearly 250 years of progress, Americans are at war with each other about the very systems we have created to maintain unity and order.
 
As people of faith, it is tempting to believe that there is a relatively simple answer to why terrible things happen in the world. You are either with God or you are not. You are either pious and observant, or you are godless and pagan. 
A system of reward and punishment has been outlined in some of our religious texts to lift up those who follow God’s instructions and put out those who don’t. But look a little more closely, and you’ll see that this system unravels very quickly.
 
Shira: In the book of Job, we read of a man who was one of God’s most devoted followers. And yet, for the sake of a devil, his home is destroyed, his body is wracked with illness, and his family killed. Job demands to know why he has been treated so unfairly. Three men, seeing Job in his wretchedness, come to confront him for railing against God. If you are suffering, his companions tell him, it is because of some fault in you, something you have yet to uncover and to confess.  
 
One of the men, Eliphaz, insists: im tashuv el Shaddai tipaneh. If you do teshuvah, if you return to God, you will be restored (Job 22:23). When you pray, God will listen to you. If only you make good on your promises, God will deliver the guilty and be absolved in your eyes, through the cleanness of your hands.
 
We are here today, partially, because of these words. Because we believe that if we repent, God will reward us with another year of life. And yet, we all know if the answer were truly as simple as that, many others would be standing here with us on this day with full faith that they too would make it through to another year.
 
Job speaks for our sense of betrayal at the thought that, if we do everything right, the pieces will fall into place around us and the world will once again make sense. “Until the last moment I die, I have and will maintain my integrity, for I know that I am righteous, and will not yield” he says (Job 27:5). Maintaining his innocence, Job is eventually met with a voice from heaven, explaining away his suffering as a consequence of God’s mysterious ways. “Where were you when I created the universe?” God challenges him.
 
Adam: Ultimately, Job is rewarded for finally praising God, even in the midst of tragedy. His body is healed, his house is rebuilt, his family is reborn. But make no mistake, this too makes no sense. 

Most scholars believe that these last chapters of Job were editorial additions, meant to blunt the harsh argument and the charges against God enumerated in the previous chapters. 

Accept that we will never understand. Is that really the answer? What comfort can that provide us in these times? And is this really a story that ends with happily ever after? As if the new wife and children Job were given could really take the place of those he lost?
 
And while there can be no true answer to Job’s challenge, what we can learn from his story is that those who seek a black and white explanation of why things go so terribly wrong will be disappointed and their faith will be broken. 

The truth is: Judaism offers not just a different answer, but a different question. When we assume that the world is supposed to add up; when we insist that it must make sense, we are not making a truly religious claim. From the start, the Torah teaches us that we begin not with order, but with chaos. For it is out of chaos that God created the world.
 
And so the question is not: how do we get the world to make sense? It is: what do we do when it doesn’t?
 
Shira: There is another biblical figure who lost everything, who was forced to confront a world of pain and loss, robbed of those who gave her life meaning and direction. Her name was Naomi.
 
After the death of her husband and sons, she tells those who come to comfort her: “do not call me Naomi, call me Mara. Call me bitter, for Shaddai has made my lot miserable. I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty” (Ruth 1:20-21). Calling God by the same name, Shaddai, her language is an exact parallel of Job’s, who also describes his soul as bitter (Job 10:1). And yet, the story of the rest of her life is nothing like his.
 
Why? Because in the face of his pain, those who gathered around him insisted that he was suffering because the world is ordered. The righteous get rewarded and the wicked get punished.
 
Where Job’s advisers offer him only cold and calculating logic, Naomi’s daughter-in-law Ruth offers her something else, something that is much more reflective of the true nature of our tradition and the instructions we receive in the Torah. What is that gift? Chesed. Love. Understanding. Compassion.
 
Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people. We usually read this as a statement of faith in God. It’s not. It’s a statement of faith in goodness, in kindness, in how God wants us to act in this world.
 
What follows in the Book of Ruth is a progression of kindness. Ruth shows chesed to Naomi and in turn, her future husband Boaz pays it forward to Ruth.
 
Adam: For many hundreds of years, our religion has been accused of being one primarily concerned with only the minutiae of law. What is the right way to tie your tzitzit? Which direction should the mezuzah on your door face? What are the dos and don’ts of Shabbat?
 
This reductive and infantile description of our 4000-year-old tradition misses the point. Despite the fact that other religions have laid claim to it, in its essential character, Judaism is and has always been a religion of chesed, of faith with love at its heart. And when it comes to being a religion of law—guilty as charged. Because in the Torah, law is love.
 
Law is veahavta et Adonai elohecha. Your relationship with God should be a loving meeting of souls.
 
Law is veahavta lereacha kamocha. Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.
 
Law is veahavta et hager. Show mercy, show compassion, to the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the vulnerable.
 
But it’s more than just acting with love, it is also learning to reorient oneself, to recalibrate the way we take in the world, so that even at its worst, we see it with love. 
We are commanded to put fringes on the corners of our garments because God wants to remind us that the power of mitzvah, the potential of sanctifying the world, exists in every moment and every place that we go. 

We are obligated to point the mezuzah toward the inside of our homes because, when we enter that space, the space where we nurture and foster the most important relationships we have, we must be ever-conscious of this obligation to be loving and patient. 

If we care so much about the behaviors we engage in on Shabbat, it’s because God insists that we be granted one day in every seven to imagine what the world could be, instead of dwelling on what it is.
 
Shira: On this day of vidui, of confession, let us confess something to you. For the past several years, as we have watched the world spin faster and faster off its axis, we have approached the high holidays with greater urgency, believing that if we just delivered the right message, if we were persuasive and optimistic enough, the words that we uttered might make some small difference in helping to push the world back toward order and civility. And though there may come a time again when that might be possible, we’re not sure  that, this year, that is the case.
 
We cannot promise you that the world will make more sense this year than it did last year.
 
But what we can promise you, is that because you are Jewish, because you are invested in the mission of our people, to bring chesed into the world, you can make it through these challenging times. With the love that resides within you and the wisdom of our tradition, you can work to banish tohu va’vohu, chaos and upheaval, and usher in, little by little, a new era of tzedek and mishpat, justice through laws of compassion.
 
Because Jewish history lives within us, we are experts at enduring the world at its worst, while also insisting that it be at its best. Job teaches us: it is not our project to unravel the mysteries of good and evil, and how and why and when manifestations of both occur in our lives.
 
Rather, it is our purpose to accept the chaos around us as the way of the world, and to go to work, soul by soul, on comforting and lifting up those who are facing it.
 
Adam: Put another way, the act of God is not the virus, the violence, or the anger and resentment that poisons so much in this world. The act of God is when those who are inspired by God’s Torah open their hands and hearts to those who are in need of its redemptive message.

Just as Ruth did, we must say to those around us: your pain is my pain, your fight is my fight. Your story is my story and your healing is my healing.
 
On Tuesday morning, at 7am, we’ll leave behind this beautifully designed, technologically advanced portal, and re-enter the humble and generally uncooperative virtual environment of Zoom. 
We’ll go back to saying the Mourners’ Kaddish with voices that overlap and overwhelm. 

But here’s the thing: you can make the same choice that we have learned to make. In that chaotic chorus of voices, words of praise about God and the world God created, you can choose to hear not disjointedness and disconnection, but the opposite. 

Voices filled with love and reverence, with longing and hope, reaching out across the geographies of physical and virtual space. 

You can reorient yourself to a world that seems to be a total mess, and yet, if you listen hard enough to the beating heart within you, and at the center of our faith, you can transform both your perception of the world and free yourself of the malaise that has weighed us all down for far too long. 
 
Shira: And you will come to understand, just as we have, that what you’re listening to is not out of rhythm at all, but a sound perfectly calibrated for this moment.  And then, you can leave your home, and go out into this chaotic time that we all live in and see not brokenness, but opportunities to make the world whole.

Adam and Shira: [overlapping] Yitkadal veyitkadash sheme raba. Oseh shalom b’imromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu. May the one who brings peace above, bring peace to us, to all of Israel, to all those who dwell on earth. 
 
[in unison] Ve’imru: Amen. 

By Rabbi Shira Wallach
 
One of the most beautiful Jewish ideas is our vision of community: an embracing, loving, expansive, caring family. Because we rejoice our simchas together, our shared joy is magnified. Because we mourn our losses together, our shared despair is a bit easier to bear. Because we all feel a sense of responsibility for one another, Jews who have never met are still bound together by our common history and experience.
 
It’s no different in the way this week’s parasha, Yitro, characterizes the incredibly climactic and coalescing moment of Revelation, when God bestowed upon us the deeply precious gift of Torah. When we left Egypt, we were downtrodden refugees escaping from Pharaoh’s soul-crushing oppression, but when we stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, we became Am Yisrael—the people of Israel—united under a common law, protected by a sacred covenant with our God.
 
This moment was so transformative, so central to the Jewish narrative, that our tradition teaches us that it was not only those who were physically present for Revelation at Sinai, but “all the souls still destined to be created” (Exodus Rabbah 28:6). It is because of this midrash that we cherish the ubiquitous belief that every single Jewish soul—by birth or by choice, from that generation all the way into the infinite future—shared the ecstatic fusion of heaven and earth on that day, when God’s voice echoed across the great expanse of the wilderness.  
 
But if we look closely at the Torah, we make the heartbreaking discovery that this is only a half-truth. To adequately prepare the Israelites for Revelation, “Moses came down from the mountain to the people and warned the people to stay pure, and they washed their clothes. And he said to the people: be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman” (Exodus 19:14-15). Commentaries suggest that part of achieving spiritual readiness is to attain a state of sexual purity. And so, in the heteronormative world of the Ancient Near East, we can only assume that Moses was addressing the men. In his mind, the men were Am Yisrael, the People of Israel, the inheritors of tradition, and the women were not only excluded from Moses’ assumed audience, but were a potential source of impurity that would render the men unfit to receive God’s laws.
 
Furthermore, God delivered the Ten Commandments in the masculine singular verb formation. How does our experience change, when only the men are told: “I am the Lord who brought you out of Egypt” or “Remember Shabbat and keep it holy” or “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” (Exodus 20)? How can the women of our history, our present, and our future move from the periphery to the center of Jewish tradition and study?
 
Dirshuni, a collection of modern commentaries written by women rabbis and scholars, imagines a conversation between God and a young woman who is struggling with her invisibility in the Torah’s account of Revelation. “God says to her: How long I have waited for you to come to Me and challenge Me, so that I can clarify for you what has been hidden away for three thousand years! I told Moses: ‘Go to the people and warn them to stay pure today and tomorrow. Let them wash their clothes. Let them be ready on the third day: for on the third day the Lord will come down, in the sight of all the people’ (Exodus 19:10-11).”
 
Tamar Beulah, the author of this midrash, points out that Moses made an erroneous assumption in response to God’s warning about purity. It was never God’s intention to name women as a source of impurity. It was never God’s intention that women should be separated—physically or intellectually—from the most important event in our history, or any subsequent conversation about Torah, halakha, practice, or prayer.
 
This Shabbat, when we hear the majestic and timeless words of the Ten Commandments, let us ponder their revelatory brilliance, and at the same time, let us challenge their assumptions. For it is only when we embrace the entire community that our fullest joy and greatest potential become possible.

A sermon by Rabbi Adam Roffman
​Among the tales in the Roffman family lore is a story about my brother who, when he was very young, before I was born, went out to eat one night with my parents. It was February and the restaurant had been releasing, a week at a time, commemorative plates featuring the faces of the great American presidents.  That week, they honored our 16th president, drawn, as usual, in his impressively tall top hat.
 
“Do you know who that is?” my parents asked my brother.
 
“Yes!” he answered.  “That’s Abraham Lincoln!  He freed the slabes!”
 
No, that’s not a typo. S-l-a-b-e-s. Slabes.
 
And then he said: “And that’s why we celebrate Thanksgiving!”
 
I think of that story often this time of year, as I reflect on the meaning of a holiday that holds great significance for American Jews. After all, we have a lot to be thankful for, living in the greatest diaspora community in the history of our people, afforded the rights and privileges denied to us for so many years.
 
And yet, because we are taught that expressing our gratitude through prayer and ritual is one of the fundamental tasks of daily Jewish life, it seems a little odd that we should celebrate that gratitude on any one day of the year.  Is there something more to the nature of this holiday that might help us understand why this day of thanks is, as we say, different from all other days of thanksgiving? And is that “something” also reflected in our tradition?
 
Turns out—the answer is yes.
 
One of the most famous symbols of Thanksgiving is the cornucopia, or horn of plenty.  We’ve all seen pictures, no doubt, of the basket with a narrow opening that leads to a widening passage filled with the fruits of the season, gourds and grains that are so abundant they spill out of the end of the horn. 
 
As I reread the account of the story of the first Thanksgiving, I realized why both ends of the horn have something to teach us about why those Pilgrims and Puritans were so grateful in 1621. 
 
In his account of those difficult first few years off of Massachusetts Bay, Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford writes:
 
“The Lord sent them such seasonable showers, with interchange of fair warm weather as, through His blessing, caused a fruitful and liberal harvest, to their no small comfort and rejoicing. For which mercy, in time convenient, they also set apart a day of thanksgiving… By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine now God gave them plenty … for which they blessed God.”
 
The Englishmen who arrived on these shores were expecting something very different from what they found—a land of plenty, with ample resources to build and sustain a growing colony that would generate wealth and prosperity.  Instead, they encountered harsh winters, disease, and famine.  It wasn’t until the Native-American Squanto taught them how to grow corn that the land delivered on its promise and devastating hunger was replaced overwhelming gratitude at the abundance that now adorned their very full tables.
 
Like the horn of plenty, those who experienced that first Thanksgiving had known both a narrow, difficult beginning, and a seemingly infinite and expansive present and future now that the vastness and potential of the American landscape was revealed to them. This potential led them and their descendants to spread out as far as their ambition, hard work, and sacrifice could take them, filling their bellies and their pocketbooks with the rewards of the richness of this country.
 
And yet, we know that the widening of their enterprise came at a great cost for those who had lived for generations on that same land.  Eventually, when you spread out as far as you can go, either you will run out of room or you will have to dispossess others of what they own in order to satisfy your own appetite.
 
We Jews also know a great deal about the challenges of moving from scarcity to abundance, from the narrowness of the meitzar (the root of the Hebrew word for Egypt), to the blessings of a land filled with milk and honey.
 
In last week’s parasha, Toldot, our patriarch Isaac also runs into some trouble when he tries to expand his territory.  In the unfriendly confines of the territory of the Philistines, the wells which were rightly his, an inheritance from Isaac’s father who dug them, were stopped up. Isaac successfully reopens them, but when he finds new source of mayim hayim, living waters, the locals challenge his right to this most precious resource in the arid land of Canaan.
 
Eventually, Isaac manages to wrestle away a well of his very own—one he names, appropriately, with gratitude to God, Rehovot­, the wide-open spaces.
 
Still, if our sense of gratitude is dependent on our ability to constantly expand outward, to possess more and more, what happens when that isn’t possible or isn’t ethical? If we are only able to say “thank you” when we have more, how will we maintain our gratitude to God when we, inevitably, have less?
                                                       
One of the rabbinic teachings frequently mentioned this time of year comes from Pirkei Avot: “Who is rich? The one who is satisfied with his portion.” Rabbi Jonah Gerundi explains further:
 
“Anyone who is not happy with his lot and is not satisfied with what God, may He be blessed, gave him is a poor person; as it is explained in the verse (Proverbs 15:15), "All the days of a poor man are bad, but one with a good heart has a constant feast." This teaches that all the days of a 'poor man,’ one who desires only money are bad, for ‘a lover of money never has his fill of money': but all the days of the one with a good heart, who is happy with his lot, are good [as the one] one who makes a constant feast.”
 
Gerundi ingeniously understands the terms “rich” and “poor” to be not indicative of the balance of one’s bank account, or the size of one’s home, or the breadth of one’s holdings, but of the condition of one’s spirit. 
 
If all we desire is to “widen” what we already have, if that is the only thing that gives us satisfaction, then we do not understand the meaning of the word gratitude.  If, on the other hand, we can learn to temper our desire to constantly expand, or use that desire to do good for others, those whose lot is still narrow, then we will truly be able to share in a Thanksgiving that is both authentically American and unmistakably Jewish. 

Yom Kippur AM Sermon 5780
by Rabbi Ari Sunshine

After seventeen years of marriage, a man dumped his wife for a younger woman. The downtown luxury apartment was in his name and he wanted to remain there with his new love, so he asked his wife to move out and said he would buy her another place. The wife agreed to this, but asked that she be given three days.

The first day she packed her personal belongings into boxes and crates
and suitcases. On the second day, she had the movers come and collect
her things. On the third day, she sat down for the last time at their candlelit dining table, soft music playing in the background, and feasted alone on shrimp (yes, full disclosure, this is not a story of traditional Jewish origin) and a bottle of Chardonnay.  When she had finished, she went into each room and deposited shrimp leftovers into the hollow of her curtain rods. She then cleaned up the kitchen and left.

Her husband returned with his new girl, and all was bliss for the first few days. Then it started; slowly but surely. Clueless, the man could not explain why the place smelled as it did.  They tried everything. First, they cleaned and mopped and aired the place out. That didn't work. Then they checked vents for dead rodents.  Still no luck. They steam cleaned the carpets and hung air fresheners.  That didn't solve the problem. They hired exterminators; still no good. They ripped out the carpets and replaced them. But the smell lingered.

Finally, they could take it no more and decided to move. The moving company packed everything and moved it all to their new place. Everything. Even the curtain rods. 
         
On one level this story may seem amusing, and fair.  The wife, who was certainly a victim, gets her revenge on her unsuspecting ex.  But is revenge what we should be looking for in a case like this?  Granted that the short time frame captured in this story doesn’t even begin to allow for the process of healing to really begin, in principle, instead of looking to “get even” on some level when we have been hurt by another person, even someone close to us, over time we are better off pursuing a different, and more noble, value—FORGIVENESS. 
         
Our tradition places a huge emphasis on the importance of forgiveness.  We may be aware that, during this time of year, it is customary to approach people whom we have wronged during the past year to apologize for what we have done and ask them for their forgiveness BEFORE we can try to repent to God.  But we may not all know that our tradition goes a bit further than that.  You see, if you have the strength to approach someone three times in sincere repentance to ask them for their forgiveness, and they refuse to grant that forgiveness all three times, then the burden shifts to them and you are free to continue on your path of teshuvah, return, to God.  This particular law in our tradition teaches us two important things: ONE—it is vital that, over time, we move to forgive others, otherwise, why would this law assume that three real attempts at an apology ought to clear the slate; and TWO—forgiving can be very difficult—otherwise, why would this law acknowledge that it might take three legitimate attempts before an apology would be accepted! 

The command to forgive IS a difficult one to fulfill when we have been wronged or hurt, and we are certainly not the only ones who have struggled with what might seem to us like an unrealistic obligation.  Going back in history, let’s just take two examples of people who simply refused to forgive when someone did them wrong, and made that point very publicly.
         
One was Michelangelo. Michelangelo was one of the greatest artists who ever lived.  Not much debate on that front.  He could carve incredible statues that still amaze us whenever we look at them to this day. He could paint pictures that still fill our souls with wonder.  But there was one thing that Michelangelo could not do.  He simply could not forgive anyone who had hurt him.
         
A friend of his once dared to criticize one of his works of art.  How did Michelangelo respond? When he painted the Sistine Chapel, he used that man’s face as the model for the devil.  So that everyone who enters the Sistine Chapel to this day looks at a work which is a testimony to Michelangelo’s genius as an artist, but which is also testimony to Michelangelo’s smallness as a human being.
         
For another example, how about Dante?  Dante was arguably the greatest poet of the Middle Ages. And yet, Dante had a major flaw.  He could not forget, and he could not forgive anyone who crossed him.  And so when he wrote his masterpiece the Inferno, he described the terrible torment that those who suffer in hell will endure, and he used the names of his enemies as the examples.  So whoever reads the Inferno sees the work of a man who was a brilliant poet, but not so noble in his character.
         
So if we’re having trouble with forgiveness, we’re in good company. If Michelangelo, who was an artistic genius, and Dante, who was a remarkable poet, could not forgive someone who hurt them, then maybe we shouldn’t feel so bad?  How can I be expected to forgive, if they couldn’t? And yet, our tradition is replete with examples of people who showed remarkable strength of character in their decisions to ultimately forgive. Here, too, let’s make mention of two such examples, both from the Torah.
         
The first is Joseph—many of us may be familiar with the general nature of his story; Joseph, the dreamer, the bratty, and even arrogant, kid brother, was sold into slavery by his jealous and hateful older brothers. Some years later, when the fortunes of both parties had turned completely—Joseph was the viceroy of Egypt and his brothers were suffering through a famine in Canaan—Joseph found himself in a position of power over his brothers who had come to Egypt to beg for food for their family and did not recognize that they had come face to face with the little brother they had once victimized.  Joseph faced a dilemma—exact vengeance and make them pay for their sins against him or forgive and reconcile.  When they were willing to trade themselves to redeem the youngest brother Benjamin, Joseph recognized that they, in fact, had been redeemed—they had changed.  And with that came forth the emotional cry from within Joseph—“I am Joseph.  Does my father yet live?  Come near to me, I pray you.  I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt.”  Joseph had finally reached the moment when he could let go of the memory of the wrong they had done him.  Under the circumstances, reconciliation had to have been extremely difficult for Joseph, and yet he showed us that forgiveness can triumph.
         
For our second example, let’s turn to our tradition’s greatest prophet and teacher—Moses.  Was there ever a Jewish leader who was rebelled against more often, who was betrayed more often, who was criticized more often, than he was? His brother, Aaron, and his sister, Miriam, both spoke out against him; his cousin, Korach, tried to overthrow him, the people of Israel rebelled against him over and over and over again for forty years in a row! Moses had to put up with this nonsense for 40 years!  And yet, somehow Moses was able to forgive his people and to continue to lead them and love them until the end of his life.
         
And on the day that he died, the Midrash says that Moses made the rounds of the twelve tribes, hugged each one of them and accepted their apologies, and gave them his apologies.  The Midrash says that they said to him, “We are sorry that we rebelled so often,” and he said to them, “I am sorry that I was so hard on you,” and they made up with each other and then he died.

Could any of us have done what Moses did that day? If we were in his position, could we have forgiven the people that harassed us mercilessly for forty years? Deep down we can admire Moses for having been able to forgive his people, for it couldn’t have been an easy thing to do.
         
Long after Moses lived, an anecdote was told about the life of one of Judaism’s Talmudic sages, Mar Zutra.  Each night before he went to sleep, Mar Zutra would say, “I forgive all who hurt me today”.  He understood that people weren’t perfect, and he genuinely forgave those who had hurt or disappointed him.  He gave the gift of forgiveness freely to others as well as to himself.  He knew he would sleep better and live happier if he had removed the bitterness and hatred from his heart.

And that’s just it—as Steve Goodier, who shared the story with which I began, analyzed the story this way: “The problem is... we can't carry a grudge and carry love in our hearts at the same time. We have to give one of them up. It's a choice we make.  Some resentments are large; they've built up over a long time and will not be easy to part with. Some have been fed by years of pain and anger. But all the more reason to give them up.  When we're tired of the anger and resentment and bitterness, we can choose a better way. We can be forever unhappy, or we can be healthy. We're just not made to carry a big grudge and a heart filled with love at the same time”.

I think that the truth is that we don’t like to forgive, because there is something inside of us that enjoys the taste of revenge, like the woman in the story.  Let’s be honest.  On an instinctual level, it feels good to get back at someone who has hurt you, doesn’t it?  Refusing someone’s apology gives us a certain amount of power over that person and that power feels good. 
         
It is tempting to nurse a grudge.  And yet our tradition is emphatic in telling us not to do it.  Here are three important reasons why: The first reason: When you hold on to a grudge, who does it hurt: your enemy or you?

Rabbi Harold Kushner, a Conservative rabbi and world-renowned, best-selling author, tells the story of how a woman once came to him, and poured out in detail her anger against her husband for how he left her for another woman, and how he had mistreated her and their children. What advice did Rabbi Kushner give her?  “Let it go, not for his sake, but for yours.  For ten years this has been burdening you.  If you wouldn’t let him live in your house, rent free, why on earth do you let him live in your mind rent free?”
 
What harm does it do to the one who has hurt us for us to brood and wallow in our anger and in our self-pity? It is better for us to get on with our lives, and not let the one who has hurt us continue to control our lives and pull our strings and drive us crazy. 

The second reason why we ought to forgive can be illustrated by a brief story, told by Rachel Naomi Remen.  Years ago, she went to a Yom Kippur service to hear a well-known rabbi speak about forgiveness, thinking he would be speaking about God’s forgiveness.  Instead, as she tells it, “he walked out into the congregation, took his infant daughter from his wife, and carrying her in his arms, stepped up to the bimah.  The little girl was perhaps a year old and she was adorable.  From her father’s arms she smiled at the congregation.  Every heart melted.  Turning toward her daddy, she patted him on the cheek with her tiny hands.  He smiled fondly at her and, with his customary dignity, began a traditional Yom Kippur sermon”.  The baby girl started grabbing his nose; he freed himself and went on; then she took his tie and put it in her mouth.  Everyone chuckled.  The rabbi rescued his tie, and then said to the congregation—“Think about it.  Is there anything she can do that you could not forgive her for?”  After the nods and murmurs of assent came from the crowd, he went on—“And when does that stop?  When does it get hard to forgive?  At three?  At seven?  At fourteen?  At thirty-five?  How old does someone have to be before we forget that everyone is a child of God?”  We are all God’s children, part of the same family; we expect forgiveness from God, for anything we do, and God’s children, our family and extended human family, deserve that same forgiveness from us.

Finally, here is a third reason why we should try to forgive, and that is: That the truth is—although we don’t like to admit it, that we have slandered just as much as we have been slandered; that we have insulted, just as much as we have been insulted.  We have said and done hurtful things to friends, co-workers, loved ones.  The only difference is that when WE do it, we justify it, and we rationalize and we forgive ourselves. But when it is done to us, we get upset, and we want retribution.

It is much easier to think of times when we have been wronged than it is to think of times when we have done wrong.  Somehow the human mind works that way.  We have a selective memory, and so we find it easier to remember the times when we have been hurt than it is to remember the times when we have hurt. 

And so I pray that this year you and I may work on developing not only our memory skills, but, as my colleague Rabbi Jack Riemer terms it, a good “forgettery” as well. Because without a good “forgettery” we really cannot live.  If we hold on to every insult, and every harsh word, and every misdeed that has ever been done to us, we become so weighed down by this burden that we can barely walk or breathe or live.
         
The truth is that, with no exceptions, everyone has his own baggage and there is no need for any of us to add any more to each other’s pain and suffering; on the contrary, there is a need for comfort and companionship.  Let us try yet again this year to minimize the hurt that we cause with our words and deeds; but, when inevitably we slip up, AND WE WILL SLIP UP, may we learn how to let go of the anger that we all carry around inside us that chokes us and that does not let us love.  And let us forgive, so that we may truly live.
         
​May this new year be a good year, a peaceful year, a year in which we offer forgiveness to our family, friends, neighbors, fellows, and God, and a year during which we receive that same powerful, sacred and healing gift of forgiveness in return. And to this, may we all say: AMEN.

Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5780
​by Rabbi Shira Wallach
​
Imagine that it’s November 1947. You’re sitting with your family, huddled around your radio, waiting with bated breath to hear the results of the UN vote on Resolution 181, which would give international sanction to the birth of what would become the State of Israel. What an extraordinary moment to witness—you know both the pain and struggle that have led to this day, and you know the vision and hope that blazed the path. When Theodore Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, fifty years earlier, he set in motion a critical movement to establish a homeland where all Jews could depend on safety above all else, an oasis of security in a world that could no longer guarantee our people the ability to pursue a life of liberty and dignity. As the specter of anti-Semitism darkened the world, Herzl’s cause became more and more emergent. The horrors of the Shoah demonstrated that we could no longer entrust the destiny of the Jewish people to anyone besides our own. In his pamphlet der Judenstaat, Herzl wrote: “We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.”
 
The Jewish question, he posited, would have to be solved by our own gumption. And the world saw, decades later, just how right he was. But the post-Shoah urgency forced the Zionist movement to encounter an impossible choice: should they stick to the original vision set forth in our sacred Torah, securing our biblical right to the land to the west and to the east of the Jordan, up to the Golan and down to the Red Sea? Surely, if God ordained these borders, we would have Divine support in asserting this path. There should be no need to compromise.
 
But in the post-war proceedings, our leaders began to see that insisting on the ideal at the outset, instead of working to achieve it over time, would mean losing the opportunity to ever establish a Jewish State. After all, when the UN produced a map, based on the British Peel commission report, it looked like a checkerboard: carving up our homeland, limiting our access to our holiest city, Yerushalayim. Jewish cries from around the world rose in a desperate chorus: voices like the Mizrahi delegation to the American Congress, who declared: “[We] will never consent to the partition of Palestine because every particle of earth of this land, promised to us by the Torah and the Prophets, is holy to us.” Chaim Weizmann, who served as the President of the Zionist Organization, cried: “Zionism is a modern expression of the…ideal. Divorced from that ideal, it loses all purpose, all hope…”
 
How challenging this moment must have been for the leaders of the Zionist movement. To come so close to achieving a dream our people held in their hearts for so long, and yet to be faced with the possibility that that dream would not include sovereignty over our most sacred places, including Jerusalam and Hevron, the burial place of the Patriarchs and the Matriarchs.
 
Were the Mizrahi delegation or Weizmann wrong to demand the ideal? How could any reader of the Torah deny that the integrity of our land was not just our right, but our divine sanction?
 
But slowly, the truth emerged: that if Zionists didn’t accept the UN’s offer, their hope of 2000 years would be dashed. Jews would again be scattered to the corners of the earth, back to their tenuous existence of fear and hiding or disappearing into assimilation.
 
And so, after a painful reckoning, it became clear that we needed to take the offer. We needed to put on hold our dreams of the ideal, and take the compromise so that we could be safe. That’s why, when Jews around the world hunched over their radios on that miraculous day in November 1947, hearing enough “yes” votes to secure our rights to the land, we celebrated. Finally, we could begin to work through the tragedy and devastation that gripped us. Finally, we could feel like a people with power and agency to set forth our own path. Finally, we could live in our homeland, eretz tzion and, one day, yerushalayim.
 
More than 70 years later, with the hindsight that we have now, we know this was the right decision. But that doesn’t resolve the profound heartbreak that our forbearers felt when they had to put Divine dreams aside to make room for reality.
 
This wasn’t the first time that we’ve had to compromise.
 
When God created the world, God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the land of the ideal, the place where perfection dwelled. With God imminently present, there was no room for doubt or conflict or competition, all those things that make our lives harder and more complicated. But we learned very quickly that paradise is not for us, creatures of free will, who need to grow and progress and analyze and improve and learn. Our best chance to live our destiny was not in a utopia, but in a world where we must live with the entire range of human experience and create meaning and sanctity in our own language. It is the messiness and unpredictability of our lives that force us to take hold of our own stories.
 
The Torah lays out an ideal system for worship: the Temple and its sacrifices. With the help of the cohanim, the priests, we could bring an offering that would help us express to God our gratitude, our forgiveness, our devotion. God told us exactly how to communicate and so we could follow those directions exactly. We always knew how to be in step with God, so that God would continue to protect and guide us.
 
But then our temples were destroyed and our people were on the brink of despair. Without our central touchstone, we lacked both national unity and the ability to continue our dialogue with God.
 
The rabbis knew that if they continued only to mourn and lament the Temple’s loss indefinitely, they would lose the opportunity to establish an enduring Jewish practice that could protect us through this painful transition. And so, no longer having access to the ideal setup, they created and choreographed a system of prayer: morning, afternoon, and night, that would mirror the devout devotion of the sacrifices. Instead of giving up an object of great value to express our piety, like a cake of choice flour or a blemish-less ram, we would offer ourselves, our time, our concentration, our service. Vaani tefilati lecha Adonai—we, the contents of our own hearts, became the sacrifice. Though we are now very far away from the ideal approach to worship delineated in the Torah, our post-Temple world has forced us to come before God with open souls, engaged intellects, and empowered creativity. And in this way, we discover the power of our own voices.
 
Our rabbis, in their profound wisdom, gave us language to understand the relationship between these two paradigms—the ideal and the real.
 
The ideal, or in Aramaic, lechatchila, imagines a world like the Garden of Eden. Everything that we need in order to fulfill mitzvot perfectly exists within arm’s length. Keeping kosher is easy because we have access to all of the kosher food we need, we have kitchens equipped with two sets of everything (and two more sets for Passover!), and when we don’t have time to cook, we can easily find affordable and delicious places to dine or pick up prepared food. Speaking of Pesach, avoiding chametz is easy because every single place we go is empty of it. We don’t have to worry about craving bagels and pasta and doughnuts because we don’t see them over those eight days, and we definitely don’t see that delicious-looking baking tutorial on our Facebook feed. Shabbat is easy because we have the time to prepare meticulously, so that once the sun sets on Friday, everything is in its place. All of our food is prepared, all of our work is done. Every place we’ll need to go in order to celebrate Shabbat is in walking distance. We are free to spend the entire day reveling in the miracles of rest and togetherness because everything is perfect, just as it is.
 
Doesn’t that world sound nice?
 
Of course, if we could, we would choose that world. How beautiful does that life sound, where we never have to think about achieving perfection because it’s already in our grasp? And not just in our fulfillment of mitzvot, but in all other aspects of the holy lives we seek to create?
 
What if we never had to worry about the physical and mental health of our families and loved ones? What if we never had to worry about managing a perfect household in which we put a healthy, home-cooked meal on the table every night and our kids always cleaned their plates? What if we didn’t have to worry about whether we’ll be able to save enough money so that our kids can go to their dream colleges, and we’ll be able to retire before the age of 90?
 
And while we’re at it, let’s expand our aspirational universe, because God knows how we all lay up in bed at night, worrying about escalating rates of poverty and homelessness, deaths from gun violence, dangerous weather anomalies from an increasingly volatile climate and I could go on… for a world in which we’re supposed to aspire to and live according to the ideal, we find ourselves over and over in a situation that is leagues away from perfect. Taking cues from our most sacred values of equity and lovingkindness and the inherent dignity of each and every person, of course we wish we had the power to obliterate these sources of hardship. But if we commit ourselves to that level of perfection, we will fail every time. Believing that it is in our grasp to solve these insurmountable problems only leads to disillusionment, powerlessness, and defeat. We become overwhelmed and paralyzed and decide that because we can’t access the perfection we seek, there’s no use in even trying.
 
But Judaism gives us a remarkable gift.
 
The counterpart to lechatchila is bediavad: how we act when we can’t control everything. A brilliant rabbinic mindset that never allows us to lose sight of the ideal, and yet, gives us breathing room as we pursue lives of meaning and purpose.
 
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, one of the most important voices of 20th century American Judaism, wrote about the pursuit of holiness in Halakhic Man, the person who sees the world through the prism of Rabbinic Jewish law, not as a single-minded aspiration to the ideal, but as a cosmic joining of ideal and real. He wrote: “Halakhic man’s ideal is to subject reality to the yoke of [Jewish law]. However, as long as this desire cannot be implemented, halakhic man does not despair, nor does he reflect at all concerning the clash of the real and the ideal, the opposition which exists between the theoretical Halakhah and the actual deed, between law and life…Holiness means the holiness of earthly, here-and-now life” (29, 33).
 
He shares a beloved midrash, a rabbinic allegorical teaching, to illustrate the crucial and life-saving relationship between our people and our laws.
 
In Masechet Shabbat (88b-89a), the rabbis imagine a conversation between God and the ministering angels in heaven, arguing whether human beings, who are mortal and susceptible to failure, deserve the exquisite gift of Torah. The heavenly hosts cry: That secret treasure—You, God, would defile it by placing it in the hands of flesh and blood?!
 
God then tells Moshe to begin reading from the two tablets: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt! God bellows: Angels, were you enslaved by Pharaoh? Did I bring you out of Egypt with signs and wonders? Moshe continues: Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. God shouts: Angels, do you perform work and then need to rest? Again, Moshe reads: Honor your father and mother. God demands: Angels, do you have parents? And on and on.
 
Our tradition isn’t for creatures of perfection and divine imminence, for heavenly hosts that lack free will and never have to worry what will happen next. It is for those who doubt and fear and wonder why we are here on this earth. It is for those who are just trying to eke out a life of meaning and connection, purpose and sanctity.
 
Rav Soloveitchik continues: “The earth and bodily life are the very ground of halakhic reality. Only against the concrete, empirical backdrop of this world can the Torah be implemented; angels who neither eat nor drink, who neither quarrel with one another nor are envious of one another, are not worth and fit for the receiving of the Torah” (34).
 
Judaism doesn’t ask us to be perfect. It doesn’t WANT us to be perfect. If we were, then we’d be the wrong match for God and for Torah. And if our world were perfect, we would have no need for God, for Torah, or for one another. We need to come into conflict and encounter difficulty, we need to understand what it feels like to despair, to yearn, to break down, to lose faith in the world around us, because these are all essential experiences of being human.
 
And when we’re down there, in the pit of hopelessness and disillusionment, God doesn’t abandon us. God reaches down to us and says: Now you’re ready. Let’s build this world. I know about eternity and transcendence, you know about longing and imperfection. Together we can construct holiness.
 
In our world of bediavad, ideal and real establish a symbiotic relationship, oscillating back and forth between what is and what could be. Without a vision of perfection, without a window into heaven, we would never be able to conceive an aspiration of the ideal. We wouldn’t be able to imagine the attributes of a perfect world and set those always on the horizon. But without an acknowledgement of where we are, we would never be able to speak honestly about our needs, our missing pieces, our reality, and to think creatively about how to our live our values in an imperfect world.
 
Because we live in a world of bediaviad on Pesach, for example, we have to make intentional choices in each moment to renew our relationship with our story and our laws. We live in a society that mixes the secular and the religious. During the holiday, we are indeed constantly surrounded by delicious doughnuts and pizza and pasta as we go about our daily routines. Therefore we are also are given the opportunity to know that we can overcome our cravings in order to fulfill God’s laws. Understanding our reality, our rabbis gave us a ritual statement nullifying all chametz during the week of Pesach as afra de’ara, as dust of the earth. Our construct of bediavad creates this opportunity for a powerful shift in our mindset, one we would never have been given if we lived in the lechatchila world of the Torah, where in all of the land there was not a crumb of chametz to be found.
 
If we didn’t live in a world of bediavad, then we would not know illness and suffering. How we all long for the lechatchila in which our loved ones and sisters and brothers around the world would never have to contend with cancer or heart disease or depression or dementia or malaria or so many other terrible diseases that plague us. Faced with this bediavad case, our human compassion and ingenuity have been animated in order to increase the quality of life and dignity for all who suffer. We are forced to pool our best intellect and resources in our pledge to understand and treat these illnesses so that we can build a world of opportunity and lovingkindness for each and every person. And though sickness is a terrible price we have to have pay, think of how these medical advances have benefitted the world far beyond the original intent for which they were created.  Medicine doesn’t only cure sickness, it also enables us to prolong life and elevate its quality.
 
And in fact, Rav Soloveitchik argues that this is how we bring about redemption: “…not via a higher world but via the world itself, via the adaptation of empirical reality to the ideal patterns of Halakhah.” In this way, “a lowly world is elevated through the Halakhah to the level of a divine world” (37-38).
 
God wrote the Torah FOR US, created the world FOR US, and is waiting FOR US to complete revelation as we live our lives through the lens of our tradition. Is it uncomfortable to know that we will never, ever, fulfill every aspect of Jewish law? Is it painful to admit that we will never, ever be the spouse, child, parent, sibling, employee, citizen… that we aspire to be? Is it crushing to confess that we will always miss the mark in some way?
 
Yes. But that’s right where we need to be.
 
Because then we have a choice to make. We can either quit while we’re ahead, knowing that we’ll always end up with something less than perfection or, we can revel in the discomfort. We can celebrate our endless quest to touch heaven while standing on earth.
 
And that is what Judaism wants us to do. To always be a little uncomfortable. Because out of that discomfort comes our best ingenuity, our most stunning creativity, our redemptive honesty.
 
Our rabbis (Ein Yaakov Taanit 1:11) tell a story about Yerushalayim Habnuyah, the rebuilt Jerusalem of the future. You might think that this Yerushalayim would embody only the vision of Yerushalayim shel Maalah, that heavenly Jerusalem that exudes idealized perfection. But instead, the rabbis teach us that God refused to enter this Yerushalayim until God could fill Yerushalayim shel Matah, the earthly Jerusalem, with the Divine Presence.
 
In this way, the rabbis teach us that Yerushalayim habnuah, the fully-realized dream of a rebuilt and reunited Jerusalem contains both Yerushalayim shel maalah and Yerushalayim shel matah. As Rav Soloveitchik taught us, it is in heaven’s longing for earth and in earth’s longing for heaven where holiness is found.
 
This year will be full of bediavads. We will continue to find ourselves in situations beyond our control that leave us floundering. Each day will bring new challenges in our homes, our jobs, and our relationships. Our beloved State of Israel will continue to fend off anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic attacks at the same time as she struggles, internally, to establish a government that will protect her security and allow her citizens to thrive. The political climate in our own country will continue to fuel divisiveness and hateful rhetoric, bringing us to the point where those on the left and those on the right can’t even talk to each other, much less think, that someone with a different opinion might have a useful or insightful perspective to share. And though we feel great distance from the ideal world that we seek, we cannot dismiss the extraordinary opportunities we have before us to bring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness back into our midst, for we have the redemptive and creative power to do so.
 
I pray that in 5780, we finally come to terms with our inability to be perfect, to ever rise to our expectations for ourselves, in a world beyond our control. Rather, I pray that this New Year gives us the permission to be inspired by our imperfection and the sacred opportunity that it gives us to partner with God. May our discomfort lead to new creativity and discovery and may our longing bring us ever closer to a united vision of heaven and earth.
 
Shana tovah

Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5780
​by Rabbi Adam Roffman
 
In Bend, Oregon—about three hours south of Portland—tucked away in a strip mall shop between Papa Murphy’s pizza and a Chevron gas station, you’ll find a vestige of a bygone era.
 
Walk in and you’ll see 1,000 square feet or so of aisles crowded, not with people, but shelves and shelves of rectangular boxes organized alphabetically by category.  And should one of these boxes catch your eye, if you’re lucky, you’ll find another identical in size right behind it, marked with an iconic logo in blue and yellow.
 
For $3.99, the contents of that box could be yours for an evening, if you flash your membership card at the counter. Just don’t forget to bring it back by 7 pm the next evening.
 
For the 75,000 residents of Bend, I imagine that walking through the doors of what is now the last Blockbuster Video on earth is almost like stepping through a time machine.  How quaint it must be to think of the world as it was in the 1990’s, back when commodities were physical, not digital. When face-to-face human interaction was required to deposit a check, or borrow a book, or file your taxes. 
 
In its heyday, the business model at Blockbuster was based on a social contract my children will never fully understand. Because if, after 24 hours, that summer blockbuster was still sitting on your kitchen counter, or hidden out of sight in the belly of your VCR, that means that some little boy would  go home that night disappointed, his plans for the evening scuttled, as he is forced to endure his parents’ copy of Singin’ in the Rain for the umpteenth time this month.
 
And remember those little stickers they affixed to the label of those tapes?  “Be kind, rewind.” I’m pretty sure my older daughter has never even heard the word rewind and that it would probably take some sort of diagram to explain it to her.
 
I’m turning 40 this year. And though I usually get a good laugh from the folks around here whenever I say that I am starting to feel my age, these little reminders of the way things used to be two generations ago are a pretty significant marker of how far we’ve come since I was born, or, in some cases, how much we’ve lost in the meantime—just in the small details of the way we live. 
 
“Be kind, rewind.” 
 
If you think about it, what makes that expression so quaint is not the pithy rhyme, but the overall message. Is returning something in the same condition in which you received it really an act of kindness? It’s certainly the right thing to do, but that’s not the same thing as being the nice thing to do. 
 
We lament, with good reason, the meanness, even the cruelty, in so much of our societal discourse. But there are times when I wonder if the genteel era we are missing was an illusion conjured up by the language of politeness and civility. Even before the chasms of ideology and technology created such distance between us, if we convinced ourselves that rewinding a tape, or returning a book on time, was a gesture of the heart rather than simply meeting the bare minimum of our obligations to each other, did we ever really understand what kindness was?  Are we missing something that was never actually all that present in the first place?
 
If you look up the Hebrew word for kindness in the dictionary, you’ll find a number of unsatisfactory entries: nechmadut, better defined as niceness, or chavivut, which means dearness or fondness.  Only the two-word phrase tuv lev, good-hearted, comes close—because kindness, in our tradition is not a simple concept.  It is a compound idea, an action that results from a feeling. Kindness comes from the soul.
 
Perhaps that’s why Jews don’t really aspire to be kind, they challenge themselves to commit acts of loving-kindness—of chesed.
 
Chesed is not simply “kindness,” because kindness is a unidirectional act. In our secular lexicon, we do kindnesses for others.  We volunteer, we offer, we give of ourselves.  Sometimes we act out of love, but sometimes also out of sympathy, or pity, or even self-interest.  
 
Gemilut chasadism, acts of lovingkindness, are mutual, as suggested by the Hebrew word gomel, which means to remunerate, to pay back.  They are based on the assumption that kindness is relational. God extended His kindness to us by giving us life and the blessings that make it fulfilling and we, in turn, send that kindness back heavenward when we obey God’s commandments, particularly those that increase goodness in the world.
 
Of course, the concept of gemuilut chasidim also reflects an equal exchange between humans, as our sages so succinctly put it: mitzvah gorreret mitzvah.  One good deed engenders another.  Each time we are kind to another person, we perpetuate a sacred cycle of generosity that elevates us all, bringing us closer to the source of all chesed, back to God.  
 
Believing in the power of chesed is an  act of faith, one that assumes that these reciprocal actions can fundamentally change not just the way we live, but the world we live in.
 
I was reminded of how transformative a force kindness can be when I came across the story of Braysen Gabriel, a 4 year old boy with autism, who boarded a United Airlines flight from San Diego to Houston with his parents.  Just before takeoff, he unbuckled his seat belt and insisted that he needed to lie down on the floor.  Knowing that the crew would never allow the plane to takeoff unless he was seated, Breyson’s parents forced him, kicking and screaming, back into place. 
 
When the flight attendants came over to the family to see what all the commotion was about, Breysen’s mom explained the situation, fearing perhaps that it wouldn’t be long before they were taxiing back to the gate and removed from the plane.
 
Instead, the flight crew huddled, come up with a plan and sprang into action.  They allowed Breysen to sit on his dad’s lap during takeoff. Seeing that he was still out of control when the seat belt light indicator turned off, the crew led Greyson by the hand to a place on the floor of the plane, where they sat with him, hoping that the vibrations would calm him.
 
It wasn’t long before Breysen wandered off to first class, where he began kicking the back of a passenger’s chair repeatedly.  Once the boy’s condition was explained to him, he replied, “He can kick my chair, I don’t care,” and began giving Breyson high fives.
 
Pretty soon, everyone in first class was asking his name, showing him pictures on their phones, and giving him free reign of the cabin. 
 
Needless to say, Breyson’s parents were overwhelmed by the patience, care, and kindness these strangers had bestowed on their son, and on them.
 
As Breyson’s mom was headed down the aisle off of the plane after a long flight, another passenger, an off-duty flight attendant gave her a hug and handed her a note.  “You and your family are loved and supported. Do not ever let anyone make you feel as though your son is an inconvenience or a burden.  He is a blessing.  God bless your patience, your love, your support and your strength.  Continue to be a super woman.”
 
Mitzvah gorreret mitzvah.  One act of kindness inspires another. 
 
What inspires me about that story is that it so perfectly illustrates what it takes to build a community of chesed.  These strangers, cooped up in a tiny capsule just a few feet wide and who certainly had reason to behave otherwise, became united, no pun intended, in a sacred purpose---not just to get this boy and his family through the ordeal of a difficult three-hour flight, but to ensure that they walked off that plane together not ashamed or angry, but feeling that even though they had landed safely on the ground that they were still 30,000 feet up in the air, uplifted by generosity, admiration, and yes, kindness. 
 
And though listening to stories such as these can make us feel as if the answer to what is poisoning our discourse, our relationships, and at times, even our own hearts, these days is so simple—“be kind,” we would do well to remember the lesson our tradition teaches us.  Kindness is not simple. Chesed can’t be defined in a word. And acts of chesed reflect a soul that has been cultivated and conditioned to respond in ways that often defy the culture we live in.
 
When you buy an airplane ticket, you aren’t just paying for the journey, you’re paying for the space you occupy along the way.  And these days, when the pricing structure for airline seating is more complex than figuring out how to buy floor seats at a rock concert, folks can be pretty protective of the 3.7 square feet that their money or their frequent flier status has earned them.  Go ahead, try putting both your right and your left elbow on the armrests next to you and see what happens. The more expensive and exclusive and small these spaces get, the harder we fight to keep every inch for ourselves.
 
And yet, the passengers on United Airlines 2210, somehow found the room on that cramped flight for Breyson, a boy who was breaking every single convention of personal space with every limb of his body.
 
In our tradition, no figure is more revered for his acts of chesed than Abraham. And in the litany of good deeds he committed throughout his 175 years of life, perhaps no act of kindness is more well-known than the hospitality he showed to three strangers, wandering in the desert in the midst of a long journey.  Notwithstanding the physical agony he was enduring three days after he circumcised himself at God’s command, Abraham opened his tent wide, providing his guests food and shelter. 
 
What makes his act of chesed, of hachnasat orchim, of welcoming guests, so instructive, is not that it was easy, or expected, or polite, it’s that it was hard, painful even. Abraham’s story is an important reminder that acts of kindness are not acts of convenience. They require us, in ways that are often quite literal, to push ourselves past the boundaries of our own comfort zones.
 
Indeed, some of the most impactful acts of chesed occur precisely at the moments where we are most uncomfortable.  Welcoming new faces, feeding the hungry, consoling the recently bereaved—these moments where kindness is required, require us, to overcome our anxiety that so often stops us in our tracks.
 
Sefer Vayikra, the book of Leviticus famously teaches in the holiness code, which contains the most essential commandments for creating a sacred community: lo tachmod al dam re’echa. Do not stand idly by when the life of your friend is at stake.
 
It’s worth asking why it’s necessary for the Torah to command something that should be obvious to all of us. Did God believe us to be so unfeeling, and so uncaring, that we wouldn’t value the life of our fellow Jew whose life stands in the balance, right before our eyes?
 
Biblical commentators knew this could not be the case and so Rashi narrows the situation described in the verse—Do not stand idly by if you are able to rescue him; if for instance he is drowning in the river, or if a wild beast is attacking him.  In other words, do not let your fear stop you from being kind.
 
Abraham had reason to be fearful of those strangers on the road. The passengers on Breyson’s Gabriel’s flight had cause to be anxious that his behavior would prove a nuisance at the least, or so far up in the air, dangerous, at worst.  
 
And yet, when kindness took hold, row by row, cabin by cabin on flight 2210, fear transformed into joy and the air of anxiety was pierced by the sound of laughter. And, I believe, most importantly, judgement gave way to understanding.
 
Of all the rabbinic ethical dictums, dan l’chaf zechut, judging others favorably is, perhaps, the most challenging to carry out in today’s world. The Torah imagined a society where only the most learned and the most pious would be given what was once a divine prerogative--the power to judge. And yet, in our time, we are all judges.  Because all that humans can possibly know, all the collective wisdom of the ages, can be accessed in a moment on a tiny screen we hold in our hands and store in our pockets.  And when we feel we cannot judge, or are yet unable to,  we can search an infinite trove of electronic writing until we find the opinion that seems most valid in our own eyes and we then allow the author to judge for us.
 
It would be naïve to assume that everyone we meet is deserving of kindness. There will be many sermons devoted to that particular topic this high holiday season, but if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll find that in too many of our encounters, our predisposition to judge precludes the activation of the chesed within us.  If we are to follow in Abraham’s example, we have to find a way to let our guard down.
 
Of the more than 1000 hours I’ve been privileged to sit in a theatre watching a Broadway show, I have never been so moved, so delightfully undone, than I was last summer when Shira and I went to see the new musical, The Band’s Visit (which by the way, is coming to the Winspear this winter, and I encourage all of you to go). The show, which is based on an Israeli film, begins at Ben-Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv, as an Egyptian band, invited to play at the opening of an Arab Cultural Center in Petach Tivkah, stands awkwardly in a line in their powder blue uniforms.  But as they make their way, they mistakenly end up stranded for the night in the fictional desert town of Beit Hatikvah until a bus can come for them in the morning.
 
The plot is put in motion by an unexpected act of kindness, as only a sabra can offer it.  The otherwise prickly proprietress of the one café in town, invites the members of the band to spend the night in the apartments of her fellow employees.  What follows is an evening of surprise and connection, as they bond over music and tales of unrequited love and longing.
 
The musical is set in 1996. More than 20 years later, Israel and Egypt, America and the Middle East are very different places. It is hard to know when or if we will ever recover the time when we could think to ourselves—“Be kind, rewind, reset, renew.” That the secret to dissolving what lies between us could be just as simple as an act of welcoming a stranger for a night.
 
But in the end, this very Jewish musical is not really about easy solutions. At its conclusion, morning comes. The uneasy and fleeting bond shared by the residents of Beit Hatikvah and the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police orchestra is broken by the harsh desert sunlight, in which they discover that despite what brought them together in the shadow of night, by day they are Arabs and Jews, Egyptians and Israelis.  
 
A year after seeing it, I confess that despite listening to the cast recording more than a few dozen times, it’s difficult for me to get through it without shedding some wistful tears. And though there were so many elements of the musical that came together to make it hit home for me, what truly caught me so off guard, was the gemilut chasadim, the completely unexpected acts of kindness and compassion that these beautifully drawn characters paid back to each other for 90 minutes. 
 
For a time, after the show was over, I just sat there weeping, lamenting the loss of a time I could barely remember, until finally, the emotion subsided, my mind cleared and something that had been eluding me, that is eluding too many of us, I believe, came into focus.
 
It is unreasonable and unrealistic to simply expect a world of kindness.  Because kindness is not instinctual. Kindness, like hatred, must be taught. It must be cultivated, nurtured, and practiced. And most importantly, it must be chosen. To learn to be kind is to learn how to overcome your fears, your boundaries, and your judgments and allow for the transformative possibilities of soul encountering soul.
 
In today’s world we hear so much about the changes, even the upheaval, in some cases, that is necessary to restore and renew our values—to protect liberty, and establish justice, to end corruption and to counter cruelty.


We have spoken about political revolutions, about building movements to retake and reclaim what is ours or what should be.  But what I do not hear from any side of the debate these days is that what is needed is not a revolution of policies and politicians, but a revolution of kindness.
 
Because it has become crystal clear to me that in the climate in which we live now, kindness is a revolutionary act. 
 
In the story of Abraham’s life there is a pivotal moment, that is often overlooked.  To save his nephew Lot, Abraham intervenes in a war—a war of five kings against four others.  When, thanks to Abraham, the four kings claim victory, saving Lot and his family, Abraham is taken to meet them so that he can be rewarded.  One of the four kings is the wealthy and powerful ruler of the city of Sodom, a sinful place ultimately, destroyed by God, for being, among other things, inhospitable. 
 
Riding in on his horse, the King of Sodom offers Abraham an enticing bargain.  “Take all the spoils of war, all of the cattle, all of the precious gold and silver. But those you have captured, give them to me.”
 
Knowing that Sodom was a place without chesed, Abraham refuses. “I swear to the Lord, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth: I will not take so much as a thread or sandal strap of what is yours; for none shall say it is the King of Sodom who has made Abraham rich.”
 
In that moment, Abraham faced a critical choice.  He could accept the way of the world as it was, a world where indifference to cruelty gave men access to power and wealth.
 
Or, he could revolt. He could resist.  He could stare into the eyes of a man who dared to judge the fate of multitudes in an instant, who stood idly by as his people shut out the vulnerable and the needy, who built a city with cynicism and fear in his heart, and say to him, “For me and my descendants, I will build the world anew. I will remake this land in the image of the One who charged me to fill it with tzedek and mishpat, justice and righteousness. And as the psalmist wrote, olam chesed yibaneh, I will build that world with acts of lovingkindness.
 
It will not be easy, it will not happen all at once.  And it will require each of us to harness the power of teshuva, of refining the soul, and returning it to its purest form. 
 
To create a world where one act of kindness inspires another, and another, and another, until this small crowded space we all inhabit is filled with the music of love and joy and connection, we will have to begin again. It starts today.

​

By Rabbi Shira Wallach
For our third year, Avi Mitzner and I will co-lead ReNew, an alternative approach to the Rosh Hashanah liturgy. It is a soulful, joyful, musical experience with a shortened liturgy, lots of singing, and room for reflection. We sit in the round so that we all feel responsible for the space. I create a new Mahzor supplement each year that augments the text in the Mahzor Lev Shalem.
 
This year, we will organize our service into three main sections. 
 
First: the opening. How do we enter the prayer space? What music and words help us feel like we can approach God? How do we feel empowered to lift our voices in song? How do we reclaim and deepen our relationship with God and with one another?
 
Second: the Amidah. This year, we will only do one Amidah, combining elements from both Shacharit and Musaf. Now that we’ve established our relationship with God, what do we say in our private audience? What is in our hearts that is most important to share with God? What regrets do we have from the past year, what hopes do we have for the future? How do the special prayers for Rosh Hashanah speak to us, and how can we speak through them?
 
Third: the Torah and Shofar. Rosh Hashanah forces us to grapple with one of the most challenging stories of our tradition, the Binding of Isaac. How do we continue to find meaning and relevance in this tale? Why do we read it on Rosh Hashanah? What is its connection to the Shofar, and how do we discern the Shofar’s message for us? 
 
After we put the Torah away, we will conclude our service with Ein Keloheinu, Aleinu, Mourners’ Kaddish, and Adon Olam. 
 
We have charted out each and every moment of the service for maximum beauty and impact, which is why I insist that you try to come on time and stay through until the end. The service is only 10am until 12:30pm, and you’ll get much more out of it if you can experience the entire arc. 
 
Avi and I look forward to celebrating the New Year with you! If you have any questions about ReNew, please send me an email at swallach@shearith.org.
 
Shana tova!
Rabbi Shira Wallach

By Rabbi Ari Sunshine
This past Wednesday up at the North Texas Food Bank in Plano, more than 1000 volunteers from all over the area, including a number of folks from our congregation, came to pack up 279,280 meals for those in need as part of the Communities Foundation of Texas’ 18th Annual Freedom Day.  This year was the first year that our local Freedom Day was linked into the federally-recognized September 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance and the associated efforts spearheaded by friends Jay Winuk and David Paine and the 501c3 they founded, 9/11 Day.  The Dallas Meal Pack was one of eight major hunger-related service projects 9/11 Day organized around the nation this year, including New York, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Atlanta.  It was also one of many volunteer service projects that Communities Foundation of Texas organized in the DFW area in observance of the CFT-created “Freedom Day.”  Nationally, close to 12,000 volunteers participated in 9/11 Day Meal Pack projects with the goal of packing over 3,000,000 meals for people in need.

I was privileged to be invited to share a blessing with the hundreds of assembled volunteers at NTFB before the 12-noon packing shift began.  But I was also privileged to share the stage with David Paine, who came in to support our efforts and then was on his way to hop a flight to Phoenix to visit their project as well; with Ruben Martinez, the sixth-grader from El Paso who created the viral #ElPasoChallenge, who has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN and other media to help spread the word and is asking Americans to do 22 good deeds for each of the 22 people killed in the El Paso shooting; and with my colleague Imam Azhar Subedar from the Islamic Association of Collin County, a real mensch and a huge advocate for interfaith collaboration.  I was inspired by their presence and the presence of the hundreds of volunteers in the room.  As a woman from our ceremony team sang “America, the Beautiful”, I looked around the room and saw people of all different faiths and colors and backgrounds gathered together for this sacred purpose of serving others and honoring the memory of lives tragically cut short and I was moved to tears.  This truly was America, the Beautiful.

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that today’s parasha, today’s Torah reading, Ki Tetze, ends with three powerful verses about memory.  We read these verses today and also on the Shabbat prior to the holiday of Purim every year, known as Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of Memory.  These verses instruct us to “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt – how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear.  Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens.  Do not forget!”
         
Rather emphatically, the Torah calls on us to remember this arch-enemy of the Jewish people throughout our generations.  The evil Haman on Purim is descended from Amalek and whenever his name is mentioned in the Megillah reading we blot it out with the sound of the graggers in fulfillment of the verse.  Jews are known for our long-term memory, not only of the attacks and persecutions of our enemies, but also of the gracious acts of God on our behalf.  And when God asks us to remember, there is an expectation on God’s part that we will take appropriate action as well in response to our remembrance.
         
When it comes to the events of 9/11, for many of us, these memories are still very painful and traumatic and difficult.  Some of us may have lost loved ones, or known victims or their families, or had friends who narrowly escaped being among those individuals.  Others have the indelible images of the attacks in our memory banks from the repeated showings on television and elsewhere.  But we are now at the point, 18 years later, where close to a generation of people in our country either weren’t alive when this devastation occurred or were only toddlers and thus have no conscious memory of the attacks or the aftermath.  I was at Yavneh Academy’s High School Back-to-School Night on Wednesday evening, and when I met my son Jonah’s Hebrew teacher, he told the assembled parents that for class that morning he had not focused on Hebrew, but instead showed the students some clips of video and audio footage from 9/11, including calls from the doomed planes and other similarly emotional testimony of the tragedy.  For most of the kids it was the first time they had seen or heard these clips, which is why the teacher felt it was important to take class time out to show them.    

This is an important reminder that memory quickly becomes history.  Some among us are still survivors of the Holocaust, or children or grandchildren of survivors, and some may still remember U.S. national traumas like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but none of us remembers firsthand the blowing up of the Maine in Havana Harbor near the end of the 19th century, or the defeat of the defenders at the Alamo in the 1830s.  But we still as a nation recall these events and others.  The cries of “Remember the Alamo” or “Remember the Maine” or “Remember Pearl Harbor” still reverberate in our collective memory as a nation, just as “Never Forget” reverberates in the shadow of the Holocaust almost 75 years later.
                   
It is important that we remember the pain and the sorrow, the trauma and the shock and that we express our feelings each year.  However, it is also important to remember as well the response of our nation, the heroes, police, firefighters, military service members, doctors, nurses, health care providers, and others who tried to and in some cases succeeded in saving lives, who ministered to the injured and the bereaved, and those who attempted to bring comfort to all who were impacted by these traumatic attacks.  I’ll never forget what I experienced at NY Penn Station the Friday after 9/11 when I was heading down from the Jewish Theological Seminary to my student pulpit at Beth El in Baltimore, MD.  I saw people all around me and throughout the station begin to rise and applaud and was not sure why they were doing so, until I saw several firefighters in dirty uniforms emerge at the top of an escalator.  An entire train station worth of people gave these four firefighters a prolonged standing ovation, which I must say was an incredibly powerful moment.  Just a few short years later, would that still have happened?  Or more generally, do we express our continued appreciation to our first responders for all they do and what they risk every day to help us and keep us safe? 

It is important as well to remember how we came together as a nation and how we, for a moment at least, were united as one great family and were embraced by countless strangers around the world who felt our pain and offered their support.  No doubt there are real and troubling questions as to what is left of that communal and national unity that was felt 18 years ago, but when I stood on the stage at NTFB on Wednesday I felt an incredible rush of pride in our country and in what we can be and what we can do when we set our minds to it.  18, “Chai”, years after 9/11, we must still treasure the gift and sanctity of life and challenge ourselves regularly to use that gift to leave a lasting impact on the world around us.
         
As I bring these remarks to a close, I’d like to share with you now the brief one-minute blessing I shared with the assembled crowd at NTFB on Wednesday, inspired by a prayer written by my colleague Rabbi Naomi Levy.  And then I’ll ask you all to rise and join me in reading A Prayer for Our Country together on p.177 in our Siddur, followed by the singing of America, the Beautiful, on p. 453.
 
There’s a phrase in the Haggadah, the book from which we tell the story of the Exodus at the Passover Seder: 
מאבל ליום טוב, ומאפלה לאור גדול
“From mourning to a day of goodness, from thick darkness to a great light”.
 
We remember the victims of the tragedy on 9/11.  We remember those who stood up on 9/11 and gave their lives so that others might live.  When all seemed lost, when the world seemed like a dark and heartless place, they restored our faith in people and our trust in God.  They taught us hope, and fearlessness, and honor.
 
We will never forget their heroism and their sacrifice.  We will teach our children and grandchildren about their courage in the face of danger.  We will try with all our might to live up to the example they have set.  
 
We will not ignore human suffering, we will not be indifferent to the cries of those who are hungry, or in need, or in pain; we have been changed forever by that fateful day of 9/11.  May we who have gathered here today continue to honor the memory of those who perished and move from that day of deep and profound darkness to a day, THIS day, of profound goodness, blessing, and light.  AMEN.