The following is the sermon I delivered on Rosh Hashanah morning 5776.
Shanah
Tovah.
This being
the 14th High Holy Days that we’ve shared together, I hope you’ll indulge a
personal reflection. I think back all the way to the first High Holy Day
sermon I delivered here. It was Yom Kippur. The year was 2002 or 5762, if
the Hebrew calendar is more your style, and I was a freshly minted rabbi
straight out of seminary. I remember the moment vividly: standing up as
the ark was closing, walking from my seat over there across the bema, arriving
at this very spot. I remember looking up to see all of your faces. Faces
that were unknown to me before that moment, with no history or memories yet
cultivated or shared. And the rest, as they say, is history. Now, 14
years later, I am ever so grateful for all the times we’ve shared and the
multitude of memories we’ve made together.
The power of
memory: let’s start there.
In his
beautiful book Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer writes
about the special place memory holds in Jewish consciousness:
“Jews have
six senses: Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing … [and] memory. While
[others] experience and process the world through the traditional senses...for
Jews, memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver
glimmer.... It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks – when
his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his
grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp
forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no
pain – that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When a Jew encounters a
pin, he asks: What does it remember like?”[i]
Not “What
does it feel like?” but “What does it remember like?” An inherently and
uniquely, I believe, Jewish question. But to fully understand it, we must
first distinguish memory from history.
To
demonstrate, an example from my family – some of you have heard me share this
before:
When my son
was three, we took him skiing with us in Colorado. It was a
disaster. He hated ski school, his boots hurt, the snow was slushy, and
his skis kept getting stuck along the very small bunny hill run. Because the
experience was so bad, we assumed that that would be our first and last family
ski trip. History.
But
something funny happened when we printed out our pictures from the trip about 2
weeks later. Our son started recalling how much fun he had had on our
first ski trip. That he was proud of himself that by the 4th and final
day the boots didn’t hurt as bad and he couldn’t wait to go skiing again.
Memory.
History is
something to which we are witness, over which we have little to no control.
Memory, on the other hand, is something we shape ourselves. History is
passive, and it navigates in the past. Memory, on the other hand, is active,
innately more personal, and helps us construct identity. Memory is not just
about the past, but the present and the future as well.
And Jewish
memory ups the ante on just how much potential it has to form and shape what is
possible in the world! One of the unique gifts of Judaism is its
insistence that memory is nothing less than the driver of creativity,
inspiration, and transformation.
One of the
most repeated commandments, appearing more than 120 times in the Torah alone,
is Zachor/Remember, and it is not just an ancient biblical notion; it is
a critical tenet for us in our day too: that we remember our past and affirm
who we are in order to navigate into the future. Zachor/Remember.
Want to know
something interesting? In the original form of Hebrew, there is no word
for “survival.” Think about this for a minute. How is it possible,
for a people who has undergone such tragedy and in so many ways prided itself
on its miraculous ability to survive, that there is no original Hebrew word for
survival!?
Over and
over again, in the face of imminent danger and destruction, we have instead
responded with, what former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain Jonathan Sacks,
rightly calls, “a burst of creativity!”[ii]
It was the destruction of the First and Second Temples that gave birth to the
creation of the Talmud. It was the Spanish Inquisition that gave birth to
rich mysticism of Tzfat. And as Rabbi Sacks himself writes: “The Holocaust,
in human terms the worst tragedy of all, led to the single greatest affirmation
of the collective Jewish will…the birth of the state of Israel. Jews recovered,
[and] turned tragedy into creativity because they refused to see themselves as
victims.”[iii] In
reflecting on what has happened to us, we have always chosen to remember, not
with the lens of victimization and despair, but instead with operating
assumptions of agency and hope.
This idea is
woven into the critical three part narrative that is our Jewish master story:
1. They
tried to kill us.
2. We
thrived instead.
3. Let’s
eat.
But too
often in our day, we remember only the “they tried to kill us” part of the
story. And we let that singular viewpoint color and shape who we are as
Jews. This, my friends, is what I view as the greatest existential threat to
Judaism and Jewish peoplehood in our time. Not Iran. Not Hamas. Not
anti-Semitism in Europe. Not the Republicans or the Democrats. But
what seems to be the Jewish community’s singular obsession with Jewish survival
as the end all and only metric that matters. Google the phrase:
“Jewish survival” – it will come up 26,500,000 times! But a Judaism that is
obsessed only with its survival is a Judaism that will not survive.
Renowned
Scholar Jacob Neusner addresses this issue when he writes: “... The major
concerns of the Jews retain the obsolete qualities of the siege-mentality… And
for the average [American] Jew, the chief Jewish issue is phrased in wholly
ethnic terms: whether children marry Jews is [too often] more important than
whether they build Jewish homes, [and] whether people live in Jewish
neighborhoods matters more than whether the neighborhoods in which they do live
are places of dignity and commonplace justice.”[iv]
And in a country in which Jews are more assimilated and better accepted than
they have ever been at any other time in history, we cannot, nor should we,
expect that our children will be satisfied when we answer their question of
“Why be Jewish” with a fear driven statement evoking a narrative about the
Holocaust or worse, with a passive statement about “that’s just how it’s always
been.” These answers, thankfully, no longer satisfy. Survival is
not enough.
Look up
survival in the dictionary, and you will see it defined as: “remaining alive
after the occurrence of some event.” It means having a pulse, it means “not
being dead.” There is no Jewish word for “survival” because this, in and of
itself, from a Jewish view, is not really living.
Judaism is
concerned not with surviving, but with thriving. We must shift our concerns
away from how many people with a pulse we can get to fill the seats, and focus
on getting people enlivened by Judaism. Getting people’s hearts to race
faster with the electric pulse of Jewish wisdom, inspiring them to, at once,
connect with the generations before them and to see themselves as inheritors
and progenitors of a faith and practice that calls them to do nothing less than
heal the sick, clothe the naked, help the poor, pursue peace, love each other,
to animate the Divine in themselves and others so that they can transform the
world from the way it is to the way it can yet be.
Should we be
concerned with the external threats that loom? Yes, of course we should.
But if we let fear be the sole driver for that concern, if the only
reason for our worry is to continue a Judaism that exists in name only, well
then, what’s it all for?
Let me speak
for a moment to those of you who are here today even though you really would
rather be somewhere else. Why are you here? Maybe you were dragged
here – either by the living forces of family or community or the voices of ages
past that stir a guilt inside you that needs to be silenced. Maybe you
are here because of Jewish survival. Because of what our ancestors sacrificed
for you to be here. Maybe you don’t even know why you are here. But
nevertheless, you are here.
Despite
cynicism and skepticism, despite alienation and marginalization, you are here.
And I believe that one of the reasons you are also here is because
in some part of yourself, you remember
that here, today, is the possibility that maybe, just maybe, something will
happen. That you might feel less alone, that you might feel awakened,
enlivened. That you might be brought more fully into your life, the life
of community, the life of the world. With your questions of transcendence,
your struggles over life’s meaning and your purpose in the world – you are
here. We are here.
Sure, the
first thing that may come to your mind in remembering is the “they tried to
kill us” part of the story, but I also think that each and every one of us deep
down carries the deeper moral and message. Part two and three of the story: “We
didn’t just survive – we thrived.” And then, “Let’s eat!”
Deep down in
our kishkes, this is the root of our
profound pride. Jewish population studies may report low percentages of
religious affiliation, but the percentage of Jews who feel proud to be Jewish
soars higher than it ever has before.
And in this,
we see what is undeniably the greatest opportunity beckoning the Jewish
community at this moment in time: We Jews are on the precipice of the next
great burst of creativity: the next great American Judaism, a Jewish
renaissance revitalized for our time.
We are more
than just cells and oxygenation, more than metabolism and response to stimuli.
As the great 20th century Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik puts it: “Man is born
an object and dies an object, but possesses the ability to live like a subject,
like a creator, an innovator... Man’s task in the world, according to Judaism,
is to transform fate into destiny; a passive existence into an active
existence; an existence of compulsion, perplexity, and muteness into an
existence replete with a powerful will, with resourcefulness, daring and
imagination.”[v]
Did you know
that Rosh Hashanah is not the original name for this day we observe today?
Long before it was Rosh Hashanah, it was Yom HaZikaron - the Day
of Remembering. And then later, it became Yom Harat HaOlam - The
Day of the Birth of the World.
On this
first day of the New Year, this Yom Harat HaOlam - this Birth Day - this
day that insists that what is at stake is nothing less than the rebirth and
renewal of ourselves, our relationships, and our world, and on this Yom
HaZikaron, this Day of Remembering - of reframing, widening and deepening
our memory to encompass the fullest and best version of who we’ve been, who we
are, and who we can yet and once again be, I invite you to remember:
What does
being a Jew remember like?
What does
being a part of this community remember like?
What does
being part of the people whose eyes are always open to what is yet possible
remember like?
Remember
with me the story of Creation – the story we celebrate this day. We are
likely familiar with the Genesis “In the beginning God created” story. It puts
each phase of creation neatly into one of 6 days and names the 7th day the day
of rest. A friend of mine likes to call that story the Container Store
creation story because everything fits nicely and easily into pretty little
structures that are easy to understand. In it, we, humans, are the
passive recipients of God’s creation and need to respond accordingly – God’s
“yes-men” as it were.
But I want
to let you in on a little secret. This isn’t actually the first creation
story. There is a story that comes before that story, originating in the Jewish
mystical tradition. This is the one I want you to remember: Your
soul will remember it even if your mind does not.
In the
beginning, God’s presence filled the universe and there was only light. When
God decided to bring this world into being, to make room for creation, God
needed to make space for it, so the Divine contracted itself. From that
contraction, darkness was created. But the light and the darkness were totally
separate. So God sent vessels of the Divine light, like a fleet of ships,
into the darkness to create the universe. But the vessels were too
fragile to contain the powerful light. They burst open, shattered, and all the
holy shards were scattered across the cosmos.[vi]
That is why
we were created: to gather the sparks, no matter where they are hidden. And to
put them back together so the vessels can sail all the way home. When the
broken vessels are restored, tikkun olam,
the repair of the world, will be complete. We were not created to be
“yes-men.” We were created to restore the unity of all things.
That is what
it remembers like:
An engaged,
challenged, charged responsibility and opportunity, even destiny, to make
ourselves, our relationships and our world whole.
Our faith,
our culture, our tradition was not designed for stagnation, to serve solely as
the anchor of a vessel never intended to be put to sea. But more as a wide,
billowing sail enabling it and us to thrive as we traverse and discover more of
the endlessly revealing cosmos of which we are an integral, covenantal,
evolving part.
Will you be
fearless and join us as we remember, re-imagine and reanimate what a 21st
century synagogue can become? A community that is substantive and
consequential, a community in which everyone is invited, a community that
recognizes the Divine spark in each and every person and invites them to learn,
interpret, and demonstrate the impact of Judaism in their own lives? In the
lives of others? And in our world? A community that is at once
broken hearted for the pain of our world AND open-hearted, hopeful for the
potential for healing? Will you join us in remembering our faith in the
possible?
Hashiveinu
Adonai Aylecha vNashuvah. Chadeish yameinu K’kedem.
“Return us
to You, O Source of All, and we shall surely return. Renew our days as
they were in days of old.”
In a New
Year of abundant blessing, goodness, and possibility for us all,
Shanah
Tovah.
