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Rosh HaShanah

“Return your mortals!” — The First Mitzvah

For Rosh HaShanah 5770

1. A Prayer of Moses, the man of God

O Lord, You have been our refuge in every generation

2. Before the mountains came into being

before You brought forth the earth and the world,

from eternity to eternity You are God.

3. You return people to contrition;

You decreed, “Return you mortals!”

Psalm 90:1-3

According to the spiritual imagination of our people, Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, marks the anniversary of the creation of the world. The image of the Jewish New Year as being “Yom Harat Olam”, the “Birthday of the World”, poetically claims that the religious and ethical values we celebrate on Rosh HaShanah are rooted in the very act of creation. It affirms that the ways in which we, as human beings, are to relate to God and to each other are part of the fundamental order of the universe.

The opening verses of Psalm 90, express this deep spiritual truth. The poem opens enigmatically, “O Lord, You have been our refuge in every generation. Before the mountains came into being, before You brought forth the earth and the world.” But how could the Lord have been our refuge before creation? The psalmist answers by reminding us that God’s primal utterance is an invitation to teshuvah, repentance. From before creation, God identifies himself as the one to whom we can turn when we go astray.

Psalm 90 addresses the question of what was prior to the beginning? In it, the Psalmist proclaims that teshuvah, the process of returning to the core values that define us as full human beings, existed before the creation of our world.

The Psalmist’s assertion that creation itself required the pre-existence of basic moral and spiritual values captured the imagination of the rabbis of the Talmud. They pictured seven primordial elements, which God used as the spiritual framework in the construction of our world. Each element had a unique purpose and considered together present a Jewish spiritual world-view. They are (1) the Torah, (2) God’s royal throne (3) the Garden of Eden, (4) Gehennah (5) the Beit HaMiqdash (the Holy Temple), (6) the name of the messiah and, (7) the divine summons to teshuvah as described in Psalm 90 (Midrash Tehillim 90:12)

The last element, the summons to teshuvah is the most crucial of the seven for our understanding of Rosh HaShanah as the anniversary of creation’s birth. It tells us that the first mitzvah, commandment, “Shu-vu Ve-nei ‘A-dam, Return you mortals,” went forth even “before the mountains came into being.” Before God said, “Let there be light!” before God revealed the Torah on Mount Sinai and before God’s Divine Presence filled the Temple on Mount Zion, the first mitzvah, was the call to repentance

Thus, Jewish tradition sees teshuvah, repentance is the pre-ordained path back to our divine refuge. Whenever we feel lost, alone, confused, or afraid, teshuvah, the power to restore our world and recreate ourselves, will bring us back home.

The God of the Bible and the God of our Rabbis, first of all, is the loving and forgiving God who pre-programmed creation to included the universal invitation to practice teshuvah. It does not matter where we are or what we have done, we can always respond to God’s call. At the dawn of Israel’s national history, the Torah reminds us that Moses felt the Divine Presence as “the merciful and forgiving God” while hiding in a crack in the cliff on Mount Sinai shortly after the Israelites’ sinful worship of the Golden Calf. (Exodus 34:5-7) Later, after the Jewish people suffered the pain of exile, the prophet Ezekiel reported God’s word as saying, “I do not desire the death of the wicked, but that the wicked should turn from his way and live.” (Ezekiel 33:11) Still late, in the time of the sages, Rabbi Abbahu ben Ze‘era recalled the Psalm’s words when he taught: “Teshuvah, ‘repentance’, is amazing because it preceded the creation of the world. What was the primal call to repentance? It was a heavenly voice which cried out saying, ‘Shu-vu Ve-nei Adam - Return you mortals.’” (Midrash Tehillim 90:12)

Today as we prepare to enter another New Year, we, too, can respond to that primordial summons and return.

Tending the Garden of our Soul

For Rosh HaShanah 5774

It is not surprising that the theme of Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, is teshuvah – repentance, and renewal. After all, Rosh HaShanah was the first step along the spiritual pathway that guided our ancestors as they celebrated in God’s Holy Temple, the blessings of a successful year. Our great fall festival, Sukkot, marked the end of the agricultural year and, on it, with joy and thanksgiving, our people gathered to acknowledge God’s abiding presence in their lives. The rites and rituals of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur helped them undergo the moral and spiritual cleansing needed to prepare them for their intimate encounter with God on Sukkot. As one year passed, they counted their blessings, offered thanksgiving, and prepared for the year to come.

Today, although few of us are farmers, the vision of bringing in the crops, weeding, clearing the fields, preparing the soil, and planning and planting for the seasons to come still stirs our hearts. From Rosh HaShanah, through Yom Kippur and on to Sukkot, we tend to our souls as a gardener tends to the soil. Teshuvah – repentance, and renewal – is the spiritual process of counting our blessings, clearing our souls, and preparing for future harvests.

The first step in teshuvah is the easiest. As a farmer measures the bushels of grain and the baskets of produce he grew, we review what we have experienced and learned. We give thanks for the strength we had to overcome our challenges and we are grateful for our small, and sometimes great, achievements. While we certainly have not reached all our goals, we see that the year has had its bounteous harvest. Gratitude and thanksgiving rest at the heart of Teshuvah.

The next step is the hard work of weeding and clearing the garden. No matter how careful we may have been in tending the garden of our soul, sins, like weeds, continue to grow. With the spiritual harvest in, the time has come to pull out these weeds and clear away the debris. Now we can clearly see how our sins, errors, and mistakes took up so much precious space in our soul’s garden. Teshuvah is the act of forsaking our iniquities.

Yet teshuvah is more than harvesting and weeding. We also need to examine what we have planted and cared for so carefully to see if all the effort was worthwhile. Could we have had a more successful year? Did we plant the right crops? Did we have the proper balance between fruits, vegetables, and flowers? Did we use our time and our resources wisely? These basic questions represent our desire to learn and to grow. Teshuvah implies discernment, judgment, and understanding.

But teshuvah, like gardening, requires us to ask even more difficult questions as we plan for the coming year. Gardening often requires pruning, replanting, and, sometimes, even discarding beloved plants, bushes, shrubs, and trees. Often we spend too much of our time and energy on worthwhile activities that slowly take over too much of our lives. Occasionally, some aspects of our lives, no matter how beautiful and full of meaning and memories, are no longer useful or productive. They may even get in our way. Sadly, we need to cut them down and dig them up. Teshuvah directs us to reorganize our spiritual garden and reprioritize our lives.

Finally, there are times when we must move on and plant new gardens. We need to leave all behind and start again with new beds and freshly turned soil. We have to put aside our past with its pains and pleasures and begin anew. When we enter into our new lives, we bring only our memories, wisdom, knowledge, and hope. As we continue on our life-journey, teshuvah means knowing when to stay, when to leave, what to abandon, and what to keep

As we end one year and begin the next, teshuvah – the renewal made possible by repentance – guides us on our journey. On Rosh HaShanah, we feel humbled by its life-renewing potential. On Yom Kippur, we are awestruck by the opportunity it grants us to restart our moral and spiritual lives. On Sukkot, celebrate its power to open our hearts and homes to God’s abiding presence as we begin the plowing and planting for the next harvest of our life.

Choosing Life – Sanctifying God’s Name

For Rosh HaShanah 5773

How would we respond to the story of the Akeida, the Binding of Isaac, if Abraham discovered the ram caught in the thicket after he successfully sacrificed Isaac? Perhaps, we would feel a deep sadness. Perhaps, the irony would be unnerving. At best, we might see Abraham as a tragic hero, and, at worst, we might consider Abraham to be a crazy old man. In any case, what we would probably miss is the understanding that Abraham did not act in any way unusual. The story of his sacrifice of Isaac would be a common human story.

We are always all too willing to sacrifice our children for some “higher” ideal – for God, for Country, for the Party, for the people, for honor, for something other than for life. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – How sweet and proper it is to die for one’s country. Every city has statues of generals who lead their men to death. Every nation has a “Memorial Day” to honor those sacrificed in battle. Badges, ribbons, and speeches consol parents and reassure us of the values of sacrifice.

But, we do not have to send our children to war to present them as sacrifices to our dreams and visions. We can steal their childhood by pushing them to fulfill our needs and wishes. We can drain their spirits by forcing them into life choices that we may have wished for ourselves but do not fit them. Whenever we bind them to our limited dreams, we take something from their own. For our values to thrive, we need our children to reach beyond what we can teach them.

How would Abraham have understood the meaning of the ram if he discovered it after he sacrificed Isaac? Perhaps, he may have seen it as a reward for his piety – God’s simple acknowledgment of his great sacrifice. It is also possible that the ram could have triggered a moment of reflection.

When it comes to life, we are much better as historians than as prophets. We are presently commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812, and the one hundred and fiftieth of our Civil War. In two years, we will be marking the one-hundredth anniversary of the First World War. What was seen as inevitable in 1812, 1860, and 1914, does not appear as such through the perspective of history.

Perhaps, it is not so unusual that Abraham obeyed God’s summons to sacrifice his son, Isaac. What is unusual is that Abraham responded to the softer voice of God’s angel who told him to spare the boy. Abraham only passed God’s test when he put aside the knife.

Our world is a dangerous world. There are people who are evil. There are visions of human destiny that include the death of those deemed to be “other” and, therefore, “dangerous”. There are individuals who see compromise are defeat. There are leaders who draw strength for fear and hate. We cannot let them succeed.

We need to give our children the skills and values to survive in our world. We need to show them that in spite of all, life is worth living. They need to know they are and that includes knowing from where they have come, where they live, and where they can go. We need to give them the insight and knowledge they will need to live life despite all of its complications, to be brave in the face of danger, perhaps, even to be willing to die for something. Most importantly, we need to give them the wisdom to be always open to our highest values, and the strength to bear witness to those values by choosing life and not sacrificial death.

The story of the Akeida presents us with a paradox – in a world filled with dangerous people and ideas – we can only live fully human lives if we are willing to sacrifice ourselves and children to our highest vision, yet, we can only succeed in doing so if we turn away from sacrifice to life. Abraham’s faith may have brought him to Mount Moriah. Abraham’s wisdom, insight, and vision enabled Isaac and him to return home and continue on a journey that still brings blessing, healing, and hope to our world. May we and our children find the same wisdom as we follow their path into the New Year.

Living Today -- Living Forever
for Rosh HaShanah 5765

A distinctive element of Jewish spirituality is the focus on the here and now. Although we share similar conceptions of the world to come with Christians and Muslims, images rooted in ancient Jewish speculations concerning the end of time and visions of heaven, otherworldly concerns play at best a secondary role in Jewish religious life and spiritual aspirations. As Judaism unfolded visions of heaven and hell, judgment, resurrection, reward and punishment served as a way to deal with the unanswerable question of divine justice but did not become the primary goal of a Jew’s religious and spiritual life.

Jews preserved the humanistic biblical insight that the focus of human life is living in the present and not some future, heavenly reward. The insights of our prophets and sages direct us to cast our attention on where we are and what we are doing right here, right now. Their wisdom teaches us to value our moment in this world as a precious opportunity to achieve spiritual greatness.

Their insights still form the foundation for our people’s spiritual striving:

The reward of doing a mitzvah is not a place in paradise but the opportunity to do another mitzvah.
Jews praise God on earth. Angels praise God in heaven.
We, the living, glorify God by what we say and do, not the dead.
The Torah is not in heaven. It is with us and within us. It is God’s living world for God’s living people.
One moment of spiritual fulfillment in this world is more valuable than all of the world-to-come.

Even in times of trouble and persecution, our this-worldly spirituality built on these and similar insights was an abiding source of strength and sustenance.

The goal of our people’s spiritual quest was to live a meaningful life in this world rather than obtaining eternal life in the coming world. Life is for the living and we have the choice of whether or not we will be fully alive. The blessings of heaven were not forgotten, but at the same time, they were not at the heart of the Jewish experience.

The Jewish spiritual commitment to the here and now appears most clearly in the reevaluation of the idea of the Day of Judgement, Yom HaDin. Over two-thousand years ago, in the days of the Second Temple, Jews came to understand the Day of Judgement as God’s final end-time judgment of God’s enemies, wicked individuals, and nations. It was to be one of a series of events that would take place when God again entered history, redeemed God’s people, and established God’s dominion forever. These were a powerful set of images and have remained an important part of Jewish messianic and eschatological (end-time) reflections. While the vision of an eschatological Yom HaDin, Day of Judgement, has never fully disappeared in Jewish thought, already by the time of the rabbis of old the notion of Judgement Day began to lose its otherworldly, end-time significance. It began to be understood not as a final judgment but as an ever-present opportunity for spiritual growth.

Yom HaDin, Judgement Day, shifted in the prayers and thoughts of our sages from the end of time to the beginning of the year. The three traditional Hebrew descriptions of Rosh HaShanah illustrate this change. These images which once pertained to the end-time final judgment became part of the poetry of our New Year’s observance.

Rosh HaShanah is Yom Tikiah, the Day of Sounding the Shofar. Just as Gabriel’s trumpet was to call all creatures to account on the eschatological Day of Judgement, now, at the beginning of the year, the shofar, the ram’s horn, summons all to assemble before God for judgment.

Rosh HaShanah is Yom Ha Zikaron, the Day of Remembering. The opening of the heavenly ledgers is an annual event, not an end-time occurrence. Each year on Rosh HaShanah, God reviews our account. We are responsible for all that we have done since the last audit. Nothing for good or for evil is missing.

Finally, Rosh HaShanah is Yom Ha Din, Judgement Day. The great reckoning no longer is postponed to the end of time. It is right here, right now. Every Rosh HaShanah, God summons us to appear before the heavenly court for a spiritual and moral audit.

This rethinking of Jewish eschatological images, particularly, Yom HaDin, Judgement Day, underlies our celebration of the Days of Awe. It appears most strongly in the Hebrew piyyut, poetic prayer, Unetane Tokef, a central feature of our High Holiday liturgy. This poem comes from an epoch in which Western Civilization had a powerful otherworldly focus. It was composed at the time of the First Crusades. Visions of heavenly reward impelled the Crusaders to seek to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims.

For European Jews, these times were particularly brutal. Our people suffered persecution and martyrdom at the hands of the Crusader armies. The history of the Unetane Tokef reflects these troubled times. According to legend, the poem represents the last words of Rabbi Ammon of Mainz as revealed by the rabbi’s spirit in a dream to the poet Kalonymous ben Meshullam shortly after the rabbi’s death as a martyr.

This poem, rooted in an era of suffering, has an amazing this-worldly focus. Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgement is no longer some hoped-for future event. It is not a time in which God’s enemies will be judged and God’s people redeemed. In spite of the terrible conditions of Jewish life in the Crusading centuries, this poem converts Judgement Day from an end-time occurrence that marks the renewal of creation to a present day reality in which each individual has the opportunity to renew himself. On Rosh HaShanah judgment is pronounced and on Yom Kippur it is sealed -- “who will live and who will die.”

This is a worldly judgment. The poem asks us to consider our possible fates in the coming year so that we may redirect our lives. The Unetane Tokef does not frighten us with the threat of hell nor bribe us with the gift of heaven. It directs us to consider how fragile our hold on the blessings of life really is. It reminds us that we begin each year not knowing whether we will live or die, prosper or perish. It teaches us that the circumstances of life are unpredictable. Each year brings something new and if we live long enough we will experience many, if not most, of life’s blessings and troubles.

In a practical sense, the Unetane Tokef teaches us that what will happen, will happen but what it will mean depends on us. In some unexpected way, the poem flips the entire notion of Judgement Day upside down. Although our fate might be cast in some heavenly courtroom on, the poem asks us to see the Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgement, as a day we judge ourselves, the day on which we take stock of our ability to find purpose and meaning in whatever lies ahead.

In its powerful conclusion, the Unetane Tokef declares, “Teshuvah, ‘redirecting our lives to higher values’, Tefillah, ‘living prayerfully in the presence of God’, and Tzedakah, ‘performing acts of love and righteousness” temper judgment’s severe decree. It presents teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah as endowments of the human spirit. They are to be our essential tools for living. It is up to us to use them to deal with whatever we will face in the coming year. It is our task to live lives worth living.

What is most inspiring is that this poem comes from a time of turmoil and tribulation. It is not a poem written in quiet contemplation. It is the voice of a persecuted people living in uncertain times. It expresses the strength of our this-worldly, humanistic Jewish spiritual vision. Our medieval ancestors, those who first heard and preserved this poem, believed in a heavenly reward. Such beliefs were enshrined in our religious literature and shared by Jews and non-Jews alike. However, the belief that sustained our ancestors in the time of trouble and the vision they imparted to us in our sacred liturgy was not the dream of eternal life in paradise. They gained strength from their belief that within our very souls we have the tools to make our lives worth living in the world God gave us. They knew as we know that life can be hard but if we live it right, it is surely worth living. They also knew that the values expressed in our tradition were worth pursuing, that living itself could be a prayer and that tzedakah, deeds of love and righteousness, are their own reward. May such wisdom sustain us in the year to come as it sustained our ancestors in years gone by. May we, too, have the courage, hope, and insight to live lives that manner in the days, months, and years to come.

The Day The Satan Hid in the Shofar

ROSH HASHANAH 5750

One of my favorite High Holiday legends, a legend that I first read as a child and think about each year is the story of how HaSatan, the "accuser", hid in a shofar.

It is well known from rabbinic midrash, that on Rosh HaShanah, Holy One, Blessed Be He, seats himself down on the throne of judgment to judge all creation. At this moment, even the heavens and all their inhabitants tremble. When God judges us according to the middat hadin, the measure of justice, all creatures, above and below, fall short.

Yet, the rabbis of old teach us not to despair because God's justice is tempered with mercy. When the people Israel, the Jews, sound the shofar, God recalls the special relationship he had with our ancestors, Abraham and Isaac, and moves from his throne of judgment, the kissei hadin to his throne of mercy, the kissei harachamim.

Rabbinic midrash is theology in narrative form. Obviously, in the midrash, the rabbis speak figuratively not literally. They use poetic and, even, mythic images to describe the spiritual realities of Jewish life, the deep sense of judgment and forgiveness we experience on the High Holidays. The symbol vocabulary of Rosh HaShanah includes images of God as judge and sovereign and employes the language of the courthouse and palace. There are witnesses and attorneys, observers and reporters, defendants and prosecutors. In the mystic imagination of our people, the heavenly prosecutor is an angelic figure who bears the Hebrew title, HaSatan, "the accuser" and is called Satan, in English.

The story goes as follows. The HaSatan, Satan, knew quite well that when the Jews sound the shofar, God turns from justice to mercy. Therefore, he realized that if he wanted his well-prepared accusations against us to stand, he needed to stop the blowing of the shofar. One Rosh HaShanah, HaSatan, Satan, fixed upon the following plan. He decided that he would descend to earth and enter a congregation against whom he had an excellent case, a case he did not want to lose. On Erev Rosh HaShanah, he entered the synagogue and after all the worshipers went home, he made himself as small as a pea and crawled into the shofar to plug it up.

After the Torah reading, the next morning, the congregation all rose to fulfill the mitzvah of listening to the sounding of the Shofar. The baal tekiah, the shofar blower, took a deep breath, put the shofar to his mouth, puckered his lips and blew. Nothing happened.

HaSatan, Satan, in his minuscule form giggled with glee. After all these years, his prosecution of this group of Jews in the celestial court would finally be successful.

The baal tekiah tried once more. Again, he took a deep breath, put the shofar to his mouth, puckered his lips, and blew. Not a sound came out. He tried again and again, but still with no success.

HaSatan, Satan, was enjoying it more and more. Victory was to be his at last. This miserable group of petty sinners would soon be getting their just desserts. His conviction record would soar.

The rabbi became impatient. He took the shofar and put it to his lips but could not force out a weak note. Then the cantor tried and he, too, had no success. The president of the synagogue seized the shofar and blew until his face was as red as borsch, but not a sound. All the notables and leaders of the congregation each came forward but they, too, were unsuccessful.

The entire community was in a panic for they knew that they must call on God to move to his seat of mercy. They knew that their lives were far from blameless. They understood that they needed mercy rather than strict justice if they were to be inscribed for a good year.

HaSatan, Satan, on the other hand, was joyously rolling around inside the shofar. He could almost taste success. He felt that he was about to have succeeded in bringing another group of transgressors to justice.

Finally out of the midst of the congregation, a small man came up to the bima. He was a greengrocer, a man of little account in the large and wealthy community. Being somewhat overwhelmed at being in the presence of so many leaders of the community, he said, "Sirs, I do not know if I am worthy to try to sound the shofar, but let please, permit me. I know that I am not learned and I dare not call myself righteous but I try to do my best. My scales are accurate and I give a full and honest count to my customers. I try to offer only the best products and sell it at a modest price."

Not knowing what else to do, they gave the shofar to the little grocer. He held the shofar and shook it twice. He took a deep breath, put the shofar to his lips, and blew. There was a moment of silence, then a loud pop, and then a clear, heaven piercing tekiah.

To this day, it is said, that when we visit the synagogue, and we look carefully at the ceiling, there is a little hole that marks the spot HaSatan, Satan, hit when the little grocer shot him out of the shofar.

I will not swear to the truth of this story, but it comes to mind every time I hear a shofar that does not sound quite right. Who knows?

The association of Satan and the shofar, in Jewish lore and legend, is much older and much more sophisticated than it is in the story I just told. In this story, the Satan appeared as a puckish imp. In the imagination of the rabbis, he is a more serious character, an important figure in the heavenly assembly. Yet, whether he appears as a comic character in a story for children or as a serious figure in a mythic vision of heavenly justice, I believe that in the life and beliefs of the Jewish people, HaSatan, Satan, is of slight consequence.

In their attempt to describe the grandeur and power of God, earlier generations of Jews found it useful to imagine God as an imperial figure surrounded by a host of angelic servants and retainers. They pictured God as the king of kings and attributed to him all the attributes of a human monarch. Although this imagery generally fails to impress contemporary Jews on both a spiritual and an intellectual level.

Just as the holiday of Pesach has its cast of legendary characters – the four sons, Elijah the Prophet, the five rabbis at B'nai Brak and the little kid worth two zuzim – the High Holidays have their own cast – Jonah and his whale, the ten martyred rabbis and Abraham, Isaac and the ram caught in the thicket by his horns.

Satan finds his place in their company in the midrash, the Talmudic rabbis's narrative commentary, on the story of the Akeida, the binding of Isaac which formed this morning's Torah reading. Put simply, Satan, the heavenly prosecutor, being an angel, and thus, being in possession of some prophetic insight, knew that if Abraham and Isaac remained faithful and loyal and past the awesome and awful test God set before them, his ability to prosecute the sinful Jews would be limited.

The theological concept behind this mythic retelling of the story of the binding of Isaac in Hebrew is called zechut avot – "the merit of our ancestors." Zechut avot refers to the corporate nature of the Jewish people. The covenant made between God and Abraham and, later, renewed at Sinai, was not an agreement between God and individual Jews but represents the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people. We see ourselves as a covenanted community. Each Jews is tied by bonds of faith and history to all other Jews past, present, and future.

Just as the wicked among us have the ability to degrade Jewish life, the righteous among us are able to elevate Jewish life. Even if we, as individuals, may be less than admirable in our behavior, the life, and deeds of the righteous may raise the general level of Jewish life to such an extent that even we sinners are carried upon the rising tide.

According to the rabbis of the Talmud, the loyalty and faithfulness of the first Jews, Abraham, and Isaac, as reported in the biblical legend of the Akeida, are an abiding source of zechut, merit. Through their merit, they have been able to exert a lasting influence on the general level of Jewish religious and moral life over the long centuries of our people's existence.

Leaving for a while theology and returning to the world of rabbinic imagination, when Satan saw Abraham and Isaac on the way to Mount Moriah in order to offer sacrifice there, he attempted to place various moral and physical obstacles in their path. First, in the guise of an old man and then disguised as a youth, he vainly attempted to prove first to Abraham and then to Isaac that their journey was foolish.

Failing to convince them not to proceed by verbal argument, Satan attempted to block their way by force. He transformed himself into a raging river. Abraham and Isaac, however, were not to be stopped. They proceeded to ford the torrent. When God saw their dedication, the legend tells us, he dried up the flood, and Abraham and Isaac continued on dry land.

Finally, as the rabbis inform us, Satan knew that the ram was predestined to be Isaac's substitute. Therefore, he tried to delay the ram's arrival by trapping him by his horns in the thicket. This, too, failed, and Abraham was able to sacrifice the ram in Isaac's place.

Therefore, each year, we sound the ram's horn to remind God of the great zechut, "merit," Abraham and Isaac earned for the Jewish people by the faithfulness to God's command. We hope that the special relationship God had with our ancestors influences the relationship God has with us, their less worthy descendants.

In Hebrew, the word satan/Satan is not a personal name. It is a professional title. It generally can be translated as "adversary" or "opponent." (1 Sam 29.4; 2 Sam 19.23) In the legal context, however, it bears the meaning of "prosecutor" (Ps. 38.20; 109.4,20,29).

From biblical times, the title, HaSatan, Satan, was given to the angel whose job it was to prosecute sinners before the celestial tribunal (Zech. 3). The rules of investigation in the heavenly court, particularly in regard to what we entrapment, are somewhat different from those down on earth. We are warned against "placing stumbling blocks before the blind." This biblical ordinance has been interpreted in our tradition to imply more than the vile and callous sin of tripping sightless people. Our rabbis teach us that it also forbids us to place temptations before those whose moral insight is severely limited.

In biblical as well as in later Jewish literature, however, Satan has the authority to tempt. But although he has this authority, he is neither evil by nature nor is he an independent agent. In the opening chapters of the book of Job, Satan appears as a member of the heavenly entourage. He approaches God and suggests that Job's reputation for righteousness be tested, a suggestion to which God quickly agrees to.

This understanding of the role of Satan continues in rabbinic midrash. In another midrash on the story of the binding of Isaac, we see Satan appearing before God and requesting that he test Abraham's faith. Here the apparent cruelty of the test is tempered because the conflict is really between the sovereign God and his overzealous prosecutor. Although Satan is an aggressive and creative prosecutor of sinners, in the Jewish imagination, he remains part of the heavenly entourage and is clearly subordinate to God. Naturally, Satan is not well regarded in Jewish folk belief. Although he is an angel, he has a dreadful job. Like the angel of death, the malach ha mavet, with whom he is often associated, HaSatan, "Satan" is not a welcome visitor in our lives. On the spiritual level, he engenders the same feeling that I.R.S. agents, government inspectors, and the assistant principal for discipline engender on the secular level.

The figure of Satan is not restricted to Jewish mythology. The Christian image of Satan has its roots as well in the biblical heritage of ancient Israel. But very early in Christian history, even before the completion of the New Testaments, the image of Satan informative Christianity diverges from the one in rabbinic Judaism.

Unlike the Jewish Satan, who at best is a faceless bureaucrat, a celestial functionary, whose only credit is that he does a distasteful job well, the Christian Satan is a charismatic figure and a worthy opponent of God himself.

In popular Christian belief, although surely not in the faith of the religiously sophisticated, the image of a powerful, charismatic Satan has led to a practical dualism in which the conflict between good and evil is cast into a cosmic struggle between God and Satan. The image of Satan –the god-like demon – that circulates in American culture, draws its power from centuries of popular preaching, from Christian devotional classics, and from literary masterpieces on the order of Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Goethe's Faust.

Both the Jewish and Christian images of evil, reflect the human experience. The history of our century has been marred by both the evil wills of charismatic leaders, such as Hitler, made active by the evil deeds of bureaucrats who blindly follow orders, such as Eichmann.

The mythic worlds of Judaism and Christianity share as well the concept of fallen angels. Both draw their understanding of the fall from the Hebrew Bible and its early Jewish interpretations. Yet, descriptions of and reasons for the angel's fall are radically different in the two faith traditions.

In the Christian myth, the sin of Satan, who at one time was called Lucifer, the morning star, was the desire to be like God, that is to enjoy power. He and his host challenged God's authority and was cast down from heaven's height. Evil has its origins in a cosmic struggle and can only be overcome by a cosmic figure, the Christ.

In the Jewish legend, the sin of the angels was their desire to be like us, to be human, that is to enjoy pleasure. While there is a perverse grandeur in Lucifer's fall from grace, it is the image of a star thrown in blazing glory from the celestial heights, the Jewish version of the fall of the angels is embarrassingly mundane. The angels desired pleasure. They wanted to covert with human women. They wanted to be like us but failed in the attempt.

In the Jewish myth, evil is not the result of a great cosmic struggle rather it is a human option. The choice between the sanctification of the pleasures available to us on earth or their degradation, is a human choice. Angels, even HaSatan, if they exist at all, do not exist in the world of good and evil, of pain and pleasure.

Although the psalmist claims that humans a but a little lower than heavenly beings, their superiority over us is only in reference to their elevation. In his vision, they are physically closer to God. In most ways, angels, including the angels we traditionally fear, the angel of death, and the accusing angel, HaSatan, Satan, are weaker than we are.

Thus Satan is an impoverished figure in the Jewish religious imagination. The real action is not in heaven but here on earth. In heaven, Satan does the paperwork, he prepares the cases, but the argumentation takes place on earth, a place where he has no more stature than a pea.

We make choices. We are actors. As Jews, we do not understand the choice between good and evil in this world as a reflection of a great cosmic struggle. Rather, we see it as a human challenge, a challenge that we face each and every day as we wend our way through the many and varied temptations of everyday life, as we strive to enhance our lives and the lives of those we touch, both far and near.

Angels, including Satan, have no choice but to do their jobs, as pleasant or as unpleasant as they may be. In the mythic world of Jewish legends, angels do not envy God or God's power but they are jealous of our freedom – our freedom to choose, our freedom to grow, and our freedom to enjoy life's pleasures and make them holy. Angels though they stand illuminated by the radiance of the Holy One, can in no way comprehensible to us be described as alive.

Today, Rosh HaShanah is Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgement, does not mark a cosmic struggle between good and evil, God and Satan. Rather, it celebrates our human potentials. Our ability to choose good over evil. Our power to determine the moral content of our lives.

Stripped of its mythic imagery, today's judgment does not take place in the heavenly court but in our hearts. In that very private place, HaSatan, Satan, has no more weight than a pea in a tube which we shoot out across the room when we muster all the good within us and sound the shofar of our hearts.

Yom Kippur

A NEW BEGINNING – YOM KIPPUR IN CONTEXT.

The high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur do not stand alone in the Jewish calendar. Like all of our other holidays, the High Holidays part of a larger cycle of festivals and commemorations that help us re-live and reenact the great stories that capture the deepest spiritual insights of the Jewish people. As we move through the Jewish year, celebrating our festive seasons, and marking the days of commemoration and sorrow, we attune our hearts, souls, bodies, and minds to the rhythm and harmonies of Jewish life.

Over the course of the Jewish year, we encounter and celebrate the two great foundation epics of the Jewish people. The first and easiest to understand is the story of freedom celebrated by the winter and spring holidays of Purim, Passover, and Shavuot. The second, more theological, and more spiritually challenging, is the story of sin and forgiveness, exile and return, and death and resurrection commemorated by the summer and fall holidays of the Ninth of Av (Tisha B'Av), Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah.

In this cycle, a great fast of Yom Kippur, marks the transition between the experience of death, destruction, loss, and exile – the themes of the summer fast day of Tisha B'Av, and the expression of joy, happiness, rebirth, prosperity, and restoration – the message of Succoth. On Yom Kippur, we open our hearts to accept the divine gift of forgiveness. We put aside and leave behind the sinful deeds and wicked thoughts that separated us from our true spiritual home, from our God, and from our true selves. By the end of the day, we cannot wait to celebrate our rebirth with family and friends as we break the magic experience of the fast with a lavish feast. As a people, we look forward with joyous anticipation to the conclusion of the fall holiday season with the weeklong celebration of Sukkot followed by the day on which we rejoice in our special heritage and unique destiny, Simchat Torah.

Tisha B'Av commemorates the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. by the Babylonians and the destruction of the second Temple in 70 C. E. by the Romans. Succoth, on the other hand, celebrates the building of the desert sanctuary, the Mishkan, shortly after our ancestors left Egypt, and the dedication of the First Temple by its builder, King Solomon. Although we understand the cultural, political, social, and economic settings of these events, we do not cherish them merely as historical events.

Throughout our history, our people discovered spiritual meaning in the successes and failures of daily life and in the triumphs and disasters of our national experience. From a religious and spiritual point of view our people claimed that it was not the Babylonians and Romans who destroyed the two temples. It was our sins that undermined our holy sanctuary. From this perspective, Solomon did not build the temple as part of a well-considered political and social program. He built the temple as a place in which our ancestors could experience God's presence. The temple bore witness to God's grace, love, forgiveness, and mercy.

The trials and tribulations of the national life of the Jewish people reflect the struggles and challenges facing every individual Jew. As the sins of the Jewish people destroyed our temple and exiled us from our homeland, the sanctity of our homes and the peace of our communities can be shattered by our mistakes, indiscretions, and wrongful behavior. Our people long for a time of peace and restoration in which the divine presence will return to Jerusalem and all people will be blessed with tranquility. As individuals, we also pray for a time when we can reconnect with those we love – our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers, and our relatives – and let go of our anger, frustration, misjudgments, misstatements, mistakes, and disappointments. Only then, can we, once again, restore peace and harmony to a small world in which we, as individuals, live.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the day in which we have the opportunity to be free of the burdens of the past and re-create our people and ourselves, plays the central role in the drama of spiritual restoration. As we take part in the rituals of this holiday, we imagine ourselves being transformed and our world being changed. We know that we have stumbled and fallen. We have found ourselves in places and situations where we know we should not have been. We have lost our way and wish to return to our spiritual home. On Yom Kippur, we learn once again that we can pick ourselves up, find a way, and return to where we truly want to be.

In our holiday cycle, we must wait five more days for the festival of Sukkot to celebrate our return to our spiritual home. However, through our participation in the rites and rituals and customs of Yom Kippur we realize that gifts of return, restoration, and rebirth are there for us if we choose to accept them. On Yom Kippur our sins are forgiven and the promise of a life full of purpose, meaning, and love is God's gracious gift to each and every one of us. On Yom Kippur, we put aside our sadness, our regrets, and our disappointments, and turn to welcome the New Year and all it promises with joy.

RETURN - THE SEVEN ELEMENTS OF CREATION

90:1. A Prayer of Moses, the man of God

O Lord, You have been our refuge in every generation

2. Before the Mountains came into being

before You brought forth the earth and the world,

from eternity to eternity You are God.

3. You return man to contrition;

You decreed, "Return you, mortals!'

Psalm 90:1-3 NJV

According to the religious imagination of our people, Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, marks the anniversary of the creation of the world. This is a spiritual assertion and not a scientific proposition. As such, it reflects a theological understanding that the religious and ethical values we celebrate on Rosh HaShanah are rooted in the very act of creation. The ways in which we, as human beings, are to relate to God and to each other are part of the fundamental order of the universe.

The opening verses of Psalm 90, express this deep spiritual truth. The poem opens enigmatically, “O Lord, You have been our refuge in every generation. Before the mountains came into being, before You brought forth the earth and the world.” But how could the Eternal have been our refuge before creation? The psalmist answers by reminding us that God’s first primal utterance is an invitation to repentance. From before creation, God identifies himself as the one to whom we can turn when we go astray.

Psalm 90 addresses the question of what was prior to the beginning? The Psalmist proclaims that teshuvah, the process of returning to the core values that define us as full human beings, existed prior to the creation of our world Rosh HaShanah is the “birthday of the world” not because God created the physical world in which we live on this day, but because the spiritual values that sustain us within this world are inherent in creation. The rabbis of the Talmud explored the proposition that creation itself required the pre-existence of basic moral and spiritual values. They imagined seven spiritual elements existing before the creation of the world. God used them as the building blocks of creation and in them, our world finds its essential meaning Each had a unique purpose and considered together present a Jewish spiritual worldview.

(1) Our sages imagined the Primordial Torah, written with black fire on white fire, resting on God’s lap. God used this supernal Torah as creation’s blueprint. Torah is the perfect embodiment of God's word and wisdom, and in this way, our world embodies God’s revelation.

(2) For our Sages, God was, is, and will be sovereign. God’s dominion commences at creation., Since every ruler needs a throne, the throne of Glory, God's royal seat, had to be ready for God’s coronation.

Our ancient teachers believed that our world needs justice to survive. Therefore, they placed (3) The Garden of Eden, paradise, by God's right hand and (4) Gehenna, hell, on God's left. These two mythic places of reward and punishment represent God as judge of all creation.

To our sages, the spiritual and physical realms are connected. Drawing on the insight of the book of Psalms that the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, stands before God's throne as God's footstool, the rabbis understood our ancient Temple as the point of contact between God and humanity. (5) The sages’ vision of the pre-existent Heavenly Temple indicates their understanding that God’s desire to be present in our lives is rooted in the very act of creation. Our rabbis claimed that creation is inherently meaningful.

There is a goal and a purpose for our world. This idea underlies Jewish messianic thought. (6) Building on an image from the prophet Zechariah, the sages proposed a precious stone engraved with the name of the messiah as one of the seven basic elements. By identifying the name of the messiah, the person whose presence marks the beginning of Olam HaBa, the coming world, as one of the fundamental building blocks of creation, the sages claim that before the creation of this Olam, this world order, its purpose, and goal was already devised.

(7) The last but most crucial of the pre-existent elements is the divine voice that summons us to experience “teshuvah”, “returning”, or “repentance.” God’s commandment “Shu-Vu Ve-nei 'A-dam, Return you mortals,” went forth even before the mountains came into being. Long before God revealed the Torah on Mount Sinai and the Divine Presence filled the Temple on Mount Zion, the first mitzvah, God’s first directive, is the call to repent. Before God said, “Let there be light”, God had already invited us to return to God. God’s voice, the same voice that calls creation into being, calls us to respond.

Teshuvah, repentance, is basic to the nature of creation. No matter how far we may have strayed, we are always invited back home. We are not forced to travel on a highway that leads to pain, sorrow, and destruction. As individuals and as a people, we can turn to a better path.

Our refuge rests in the power of teshuvah, the power to change our world and ourselves. To the rabbis of old, this power seemed so essential and meaningful in their view of the world that they described it as the last of the seven basic elements of creation.

At an earlier age, in a different world, the prophet Ezekiel reported God's word as saying, I do not desire the death of a sinner, but that he repent and live."

At a later age, Rabbi Abbahu ben Ze`era taught: Great is repentance, for it preceded the creation of the world. And what was the call to repentance? It was the voice from heaven which cried out saying, Shu-Vu Ve-nei 'Adam - Return you, mortals.

Today as we prepare to enter another New Year, we can respond to the cry and return.

Sacrifice and Martyrdom

Thoughts for Yom Kippur 5766

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is never an easy day. Fasting, however, is not the real problem. Rather, the day’s challenge comes from its demand that we confront deep spiritual, theological, and philosophical issues we would often wish to avoid. We are asked to consider, for example; the tension between sin and forgiveness, the relationship between suffering and redemption, and the emergence of hope out of tragedy. The prayers and readings of Yom Kippur demand that we meditate on these themes as personal challenges, but present them to us in grand images on a mythic scale. The entire day is challenging but, the most challenging hour on Yom Kippur is the one dedicated to the Mussaf service.

It is early afternoon on the Day of Atonement and Mussaf is half over. The hazzan has just completed reading the lengthy poetic retelling of the worship service in the Beit HaMiqdash, the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. In our sacred imagination, we left our synagogue and joined our ancestors in that holiest place as we participated spiritually in the worship service conducted by the Cohen Gadol, the High Priest, that carried our prayers for forgiveness and our hopes for a year of blessing to God.

We trembled with awe as the High Priest sent the scapegoat out into the wilderness symbolically carrying away our sins. Reverently we bowed low as the High Priest proclaimed the Holy Name of God as he beseeched the Eternal three times for forgiveness. The ancient sacrifices no longer seemed strange and off-putting because we were in another place at another time.

Then our liturgy drew us back into our time and space. It jolted us, once again to face the great spiritual mystery that lies at the heart of the Yom Kippur experience – the tension between our propensity to sin and God’s ceaseless offer of forgiveness – our experience of exile and God’s promise of redemption. Although our transgressions destroyed the Holy Temple and brought its rituals to an end, the path to open our souls to God’s gift of forgiveness and restoration remains unimpeded, particularly on Yom Kippur, the day set aside for prayer and reflection.

Now, just as we are about to offer thanksgiving for this life-affirming, life-sustaining gift, our liturgy confronts us with another kind of sacrifice in the great medieval poem “Eleh Ezkarah” – “These are the Things I Remember.” But here, what is remembered is not the orderly and dignified Temple sacrifices offered to God by the High Priest, but a human sacrifice. The poem recalls in terrifying detail the martyrdom of ten of our greatest sages almost two thousand years ago during the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian.

“Eleh Ezkarah” is not, however, a simple history legend. There is a certain timelessness to its retelling. The details that tie its story to a certain time and a place are removed. The place of execution is not identified. The events are conflated. The emperor is named “Belial” – “The Evil One” – and the empire is called “Malchut” – “The Wicked Kingdom.” The poem glosses over many of the details of the slaughter so clearly recalled in the midrashim, legends, that form its sources.

In “Eleh Ezkarah” the martyrdom of our ten sages assumes a universal quality. They have become victims of a vicious regime whose leader bears a demonic name. To the poem’s anonymous author and to generations of Jews, the price paid by the ten sages to preserve the culture, wisdom, and dignity of our people reflected their own struggles. The sage’s brave but bitter deaths gave transcendent meaning to the daily challenges faced by generations of Jews. Like the sacrifices in the ancient Temple, our teachers’ self-sacrifice had a redemptive meaning. The recalling of their martyrdom – their deaths “al pi kiddush haShem” (for the sanctification of God’s Holy Name) – had the power to guide us on the path to God’s gift of forgiveness and restoration.

But beyond our personal need for forgiveness, the recollection of both the worship in the Temple and the sacrifice of our sages reminds us of the price and the glory of being citizens of a dominion that is far beyond the all too often cold and ruthless earthly regimes that have and continue to oppress the bodies, minds, and souls of countless human beings.

Although our sages died as Jews for their desire to preserve Judaism, we have always known that our struggle for religious and cultural freedom and self-determination is part of a greater human struggle. In prayers such as the Aleinu, we dream of a time when all humanity will be united under God’s Dominion. Our prophets envisioned a time when all would stream to Jerusalem to call on God in their own voices. Our martyrs rarely died alone. The same wicked regimes that attacked Jews all too often directed their hate to other people and other groups with varying degrees of hostility.

It is the mid-afternoon of Yom Kippur. The Mussaf service has come to an end. We have a short break. Perhaps we’ll take a walk or sit quietly in the sanctuary. It’s been a challenging day. In our prayers and meditations, we have made a spiritual pilgrimage. We have twice witnessed the opening of heaven; the first time over Jerusalem’s Temple to receive the prayers of our people and the second time over an unknown arena to accept the souls of our martyrs. Once again we have faced the deep spiritual questions of the Day of Atonement and, perhaps, all the days of our lives; the tension between sin and forgiveness, the relationship between suffering and redemption, the need for hope to emerge out of tragedy. We may not, as yet, found a full answer, but, with God’s grace, we have gained some insight, grown in wisdom, and discovered new meaning in our personal struggles and triumphs.

Often life’s deepest spiritual questions do not ask for answers but demand responses. The quality of our response is proportional to the seriousness in which we consider the question. May we be blessed this Yom Kippur to have the courage to confront our spiritual challenges and gain the strength and insight we will need to enjoy a year of a meaningful and rewarding life.

Sacrifice and Martyrdom

Thoughts for Yom Kippur 5766

A Time for Prayer

As I prepared from the Yamim Noraim, the High Holidays this year, I found myself particularly concerned with prayer as an individual and communal experience. Over the past four months, I have spent much time thinking about and writing about Tefillah, Jewish prayer. I completed a manuscript exploring the Sh’ma, the prayerful declaration of the Jewish faith, from a spiritual and theological viewpoint. I complied a new Machzor, High Holiday Prayer Book for the residents of Lions Gate, our community’s continuing care retirement community. The theme of the educational program at Lions Gate this summer has been the history and meaning of Jewish prayer.

Thinking about prayer, editing liturgical materials, composing prayer books for the Jewish holidays, and discussing prayers and praying with senior adults, has made me aware of the depth of spiritual resources available to us as Jews and the breadth of Jewish prayer experiences. It has also awakened me to the blessings and challenges in balancing the needs of the individual and the community we face as Jews.

I found the opportunity to explore the Jewish prayer with our residents especially rewarding. They brought to our discussions the insights and wisdom acquired by a lifetime of engagement with the rewards and challenges of personal prayer and community worship. Together we found the “how”, “where”, “what” and “when” questions concerning prayer interesting, but the “why” question captured our imaginations. We came to understand that although prayer has cognitive and emotional components, spiritual transformation lies at the heart of our worship experience.

Particularly in light of the spiritual goals of the upcoming Jewish High Holidays, it seemed to us that the purpose of prayer was to support an individual’s and a community’s spiritual growth. Prayer helps us develop as human beings by bringing us closer to God, reinforcing our highest values, connecting us to our fellow Jews, challenging our complacency, and reminding us of our intimate bond with all who share our world. Although we discussed many, different answers to the question of “Why Pray,” the statement, “Whoever leaves prayer a better person knows that his or her prayer has been answered,” won common accord.

I tried to reflect our study in the prayers, which I composed for our new Lions Gate Machzor, such as the following – an opening meditation to the Neilah or Concluding Service for Yom Kippur. This prayer, introducing the climactic end of the Day of Atonement, expresses my wish for all of us this and every High Holiday season.

I have only one request from the Eternal One,

I only wish for one small thing;

It is that I may dwell in the Eternal’s house all the days of my life,

Beholding the Eternal One’s beauty,

Seeking God in God’s holy place. (Psalm 27:3)

To live forever in God's house;

To remain in God's holy place;

To let our very being be overpowered and transformed by the overwhelming beauty of the Divine Presence;

To dwell in peace, security, love, joy, and happiness forever;

This is our prayer. This is our dream. This is our hope.

Our holy day of Yom Kippur is drawing to an end. Soon the sun will set and stars will emerge against the dark background of space. We will lift up our eyes and see the almost full moon announcing the arrival of the Festival of Sukkot, our season of rejoicing.

We have spent a long day together seeking God in this place made holy by our prayers and petitions. Neilah, the last service of Yom Kippur, the fast of light, purity, and joy, the day of forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace, is about to begin. The intimate bond between the congregation of the people of Israel and the heavenly angelic host will last for one more short hour.

Today, we have dressed ourselves in purity. Today, we have put aside the desire for food and drink and found sustenance and strength in prayer, meditation, and holy songs Today, we sang with the celestials and danced with the cherubim. Now, as today’s sun enters the gates of eternity, we pray that our prayers will be answered and we will enter tomorrow better people than we were last night.

LeShanah Tovah – May we all be blessed with a good new year!

“The Secret of Yom Kippur”

For Yom Kippur 5782

September 16, 2021

The secret of Yom Kippur is simple. It is that forgiveness is a gift freely granted and, hopefully, well received. Forgiveness is not earned nor can it be earned. Yet, seeking it, granting it, and receiving it, all require courage to examine our thoughts, feelings, and deeds.

Forgiveness does not cancel the past but allows for new beginnings. It is an act of liberation which shifts our focus from punishment to restoration, from hurt to healing, from weakness to strength, and from shame to self-worth.

Yom Kippur’s secret is not complicated. Making it part of our being, however, is a life-long spiritual practice.

Forgiveness, like love, cannot be earned. We can no more make a person forgive us than we can make a person love us. The best that we can do upon becoming aware of our sins is to act in such a way as to show that we can be forgiven. If forgiveness is granted, then we are free to restore the connection severed by our sins. If not, then we will have at least gained a new level of self-awareness that will strengthen our bonds with others in the future.

Forgiveness is freely granted. It needs to be unconditional. It is a gift that we offer to others who have offended us. It is letting go of the pain, anger, frustration that burden us and it is offered without any expectation that it will be received. Forgiveness allows us to separate in peace from the ones who have harmed us. It may open the door to a renewed relationship but it also may open the gateway to other pathways.

Forgiveness reconnects us to ourselves as well as to others. To be able to forgive, we need to feel that we are in need of forgiveness. We need to be aware that while others have sinned against us, we, too, have sinned against others. We need to know that the gift we offer is also the gift we need.

To accept forgiveness is to accept the fact that we have offended. The hurt we caused others to feel is real. It matters little if it came about by our ignorance, negligence, or deliberate action. We need to acknowledge our involvement in another’s pain and use that knowledge to understand ourselves better.

Forgiveness does not allow us to forget but requires us to remember what shattered the relationships that should have brought us closer to another, and how and why we let that happen. Forgiveness enables us to transform the misdeeds and mistakes that have separated us from others and from our better selves, into opportunities for growth, renewal, and rebirth.

Everyone sins and everyone is sinned against. It is part of being human. But we are often unaware of our sins and how they undermine our relations with others, our connection to our community, our ties to family and friends, and to our sense of self. All too often, we focus on those who have sinned against us more than on those against whom we have sinned. We are not so perfect that we have not sinned, but knowing what sin is and how it changes us, empowers us to forgive.

Forgiveness asks us not only to be cognizant enough to know our sins but also wise enough to know that our sins need not define us. Forgiveness, granted and received, frees us to redefine ourselves and our place in the world.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the day on which a forty-day process of exploring forgiveness reaches its climax. We begin the day with Kol Nidre in which we acknowledge our inherent ability to fail. We end the day at Neila with the understanding that despite who we were, what we have done, and what was done to us, Heaven’s spiritual gates will remain open to us through the power of forgiveness.

The secret of forgiveness is simple. The practice is hard. The rewards are great and it is a life-long journey. May the New Year be one of growth, understanding, happiness, and peace as we forgive each other and strive to be worthy of the gift of forgiveness.

Sukkot

WHY THIS SUKKAH?

Our fall holiday season reaches its climax in Sukkot, the Feast of Booths. The sukkah, its central feature, is a temporary shelter roofed loosely with branches so that star-light might enter. For generations, our people, following the directives in the Torah (Ex. 23:16; Deut. 16: 13, 15; Lev. 23:42-43), have spent at least a moment each day in the sukkah during the week-long festival.

Many Jews find the sukkah to be a potent expression of Jewish identity. Constructing a sukkah creates lasting memories for children and grandchildren. In a sukkah, friends can gather for an outdoor meal before the weather gets too cold. After a busy day, in a busy time, a sukkah is a quiet sanctuary. Above all, a sukkah is a powerful reminder of our people’s heritage, hopes, and values.

As part of our people’s cultural and spiritual tradition, which abounds in symbolic objects and gestures, the sukkah is one of the richest. Biblically, it recalls the Exodus from Egypt. The Torah instructs us to dwell in booths for seven days so that we remember that as refugees from Egyptian bondage, God provided us with temporary housing. In the sukkah we consider the struggles of our people to find shelter whenever we faced homelessness from the time of the Babylonia exile to the DP camps of post-World War II Europe. Today, it is a key to open our hearts to the needs of the unending flow of people fleeing war and oppression.

In ancient Israel, the sukkah was the simple booth that farmers set-up during the harvest to provide shade in mid-day and shelter at night. Today the sukkah, as harvest booth, reminds us of the effort needed to provide food for our world’s growing population. We take pride in the advances in agriculture that come from Israel, but we also remember the manual labor of farmworkers, many of whom are migrants, who harvest our crops.

On Sukkot we leave our homes to spend time in a simple hut. We step away from our sense of security to connect to those whose homes are no more secure than our sukkot. On Passover, we eat matzah, the unleavened bread of the poor, and on Sukkot, we dwell in sukkot, shacks, the substandard housing of the impoverished. As we offer thanksgiving for our blessings, we think of those throughout the world who are not as blessed.

The sukkah is a symbol of courage. The living in booths during the forty years in the wilderness fortified the generation that first entered the Promised Land. The booths evoke the memory of Jews who struggled for freedom from the Maccabees to the Jewish partisans and of the courage of the Zionist pioneers. The sukkah reminds us of the willingness of American Jews to defend our nation’s liberty.

The sukkah represents the unity of the Jewish people. In ancient days, Sukkot was the central festival. Jews from all over the world poured into Jerusalem. Temporary booths were needed to house the innumerable pilgrims. Sukkot was a time when all Jews would try to gather together as one people. In the vision of our prophets, Sukkot will be the time in which all people will celebrate our shared kinship under the gaze of God.

The simple sukkah we set up in our yards recreates the Mishkan, the portable shrine Moses built in the desert. As our ancestors could experience God dwelling in the midst of the Israelite encampment, we can envision God living within our homes and our hearts. The sukkah’s roof shows us that in order to sense God’s presence in our lives, we must open our hearts to all creation. The fragile nature of our sukkot demonstrates our dependence on God’s grace revealed in the world around us.

For seven days our sukkah is a tangible reminder of fundamental Jewish convictions and values. Our sukkah creates indelible memories that we carry throughout our lives. Although we put away our sukkah at the end of Sukkot, these values remain with us. Sukkot ends with another holiday, Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah which calls on us to return to the unending study of the foundational statement of Jewish life, heritage, and values symbolized by our sukkot, the Torah itself.

A WITNESS TO PEACE– Friday, September 25, 2015

Reflections on the Multi-Religious Gathering with Pope Francis

Erev Sukkot – Sunday, September 27, 2015

I was beyond excitement when I opened the invitation I received from Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, to attend the interfaith service, “A Witness to Peace”, with Pope Francis on Friday, September 25 at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. I felt incredibly grateful that I would be sharing prayer with inter-faith leaders from America at service in which the homily was to be delivered by the Pope, himself.

The prayer service took place on the Friday morning before the Jewish festival of Sukkot. The message of the gathering, in fact, one of the powerful themes of Pope Francis’ visit to the United States, complimented the message of Sukkot – the vision of a time when humanity will become together in all its diversity out of a sense of love and respect for each other and their Creator. Being at the 9/11 Museum, listening to the Pope, meeting people who have dedicated their lives to this great hope, motivated the following response taken from my Sukkot Sermon to my congregation at Lions Gate, a continuing care retirement community in Voorhees, NJ.

Jews envision Sukkot not only as a holiday for the Jewish people; but it is a holiday for all the world. In the vision of our prophets, Sukkot will be the day when all people will come to worship in Jerusalem, each in their own language, each according to their own custom; each acknowledging in their own way the sovereignty of God, envisioned traditionally as “the King of the King of Kings” – the one before whom even emperors submit. The hope is not that everyone will become Jewish or that everyone will be the same. Rather, the dream is that in some wonderful way each of us will come and celebrate God and creation in our own language and according to our own way. We will all be together and will love, respect, and honor each other and rejoice in our diversity. That day will be the moment when in the words of the Prophet Zachariah “God will be one and God’s name one.”.

This vision became a reality, at least for a moment, at the gathering of the religious leaders of Friday morning, September 25, at the site of the World Trade Towers, at the Ground Zero, in the Foundation Hall of the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Approximately 600 representatives of all the religious traditions in the United States joined Pope Francis in an hour in prayer and reflection. This beautiful service expressed the Sukkot message that we can all gather worship to celebrate our unity and rejoice in our diversity.

What was said was beautiful, but what the symbolism of the event was far more powerful. The hall was full of faith leaders from all world religions, many dressed in their traditional vestments – Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Native American spiritual leaders

On the bima, the podium, were representatives of all the major traditions. Each tradition presented a reading on peace from its sacred scripture, first in the original language and then in English translation. Then, Cantor Azi Schwartz, of the Park Avenue Synagogue chanted a special version of the Jewish memorial prayer, “The One Who is Full of Compassion”, for those who died on 9/11/2000 and all the victims of terror – people who died at the hands of people blinded by hate.

At the end of the prayer, the cantor sang Oshe Shalom, a well-known Hebrew melody asking God to grant peace to the world. His magnificent voice filled the room, but under his voice and unheard by those watching TV was the quiet undertone of the entire congregation of religious leaders singing softly with him – a quiet prayer for peace.

And then Pope Francis rose to speak. The Pope is a plain speaker. When he speaks, he speaks from his heart, in his native Spanish. His words are simple and direct. His voice is a quiet but powerful voice.

He spoke to us in Spanish – simple words expressing basic truths – the beauty of people from so-many faith traditions praying together, the sadness that the memorial expressed, our pain at the loss of so many souls, and the fact that all the people who perished on that day were represented by the various religious traditions that were gathered that morning at the Memorial Museum.

Although I cannot remember the Pope’s exact words, the message that I heard was that peace for which we so earnestly seek can only grow out of a celebration of our unity as members of the human community – all children of God and of our wondrous diversity – testimony to the power of the Creator.

As I left the Memorial Museum with the words of the closing hymn “Let There Be Peace On Earth” sung by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City in my ears, the crowds outside the museum reinforced this message.

The street was full of people gathered to see the Pope. It was very clear that I was not a Catholic, I had my yarmulke on. But people ran up to me and asked “Did you see him?” “Has he left already?” When I told them that I did but that he had already gone, they were sad. Then they asked, “What was it like?” So I showed them the program and they took a picture of the program. Then I showed them my ticket and they wanted a picture of that as well. But I said I said, “Why don’t you hold the ticket, and I will take a picture of you.” The desire to be connected to Pope Francis’ a message of peace, of love, and of concern for the world and all its inhabitants, brought us together and brought us joy.

One final note: To get to New York, I took the New Jersey Transit train from Hamilton. I arrived early at the train station very early. While I was waiting on the platform, I met was a mother with a young girl about five or so. I asked the girl, “Where are you going?” She enthusiastically said, “I am going to see the Pope.” When I said, “So am I”, a smile filled her face. She was so happy. It seemed as if the entire world was on this journey with her. It was as if she intuitively shared the Pope’s vision of humanity at peace.

This is now Sukkot. On this holiday we commit ourselves to the vision of the world at peace, in which all people learn to understand each other, to respect each other, and to love each other in all our diversity. This is also the message that I took home from my encounter with Pope Francis at the multi-religious gathering at the 9/11Museum. Far beyond the real thrill of seeing the Pope, was the thrill being with teachers and shepherds of all America’s religious traditions as we together with Pope Francis bore witness to the promise of peace. May this promise be fulfilled right away and very soon; Amen.

“BEING OPEN TO GOD'S LOVE"

Each of the three pilgrimage festivals has its own distinctive theme. Passover honors God’s power to redeem and to liberate. Shavuot proclaims God’s revelation. Sukkot celebrates God’s nurturing and abiding love for us and for the world in which we live.

The Jewish people take these themes to heart and on each festival we try to make its theme a real part of our lives. At the Passover seder we reenact the great story of the Exodus from Egypt through story and song. On Erev Shavuot, we commemorate our receipt of the Torah at Sinai by dedicating the night to the study of Jewish literature with a tikkun, a night-long study session, and vigil. On Sukkot we focus our souls on God’s protecting love for us by erecting and spending time within a sukkah, a temporary, outdoor booth that reminds us of our dependence on God’s abiding and sustaining love.

In ancient days before the destruction of the Temple, Jews from all over the world would try to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for each of these holy days. But the most beloved of the three in Antiquity was Sukkot, with its message of God’s nurturing and sustaining love.

Our ancient ancestors called Sukkot, “HaChag”, meaning “The Festival”, as if it were the only festival. They celebrated it with solemn rituals and with festive abandon. The days and nights of Sukkot were a time for torchlight processions and childlike pranks. Learned rabbis would juggle and perform other tricks. In the Holy Temple, the priests would conduct impressive rituals, such as sacrificing seventy oxen, one for each of the seventy nations of humanity according to the count in the book of Genesis, in thanksgiving for God’s loving care of our world and all its people. The spirit of rejoicing was so great that even today we describe this holy season in our siddurim, prayer books, as z’ man simchateinu, “the time of our joy.”

Despite the pomp and ceremony, display and grandeur that marked the celebration of Sukkot during the days of the Second Temple over two thousand years ago, the enduring symbol of the festival that reminds us of God’s unceasing and unconditional love and affection for us as individuals and as a people is the humble sukkah. The sukkah, the beautifully decorated but fragile structure, which graces many Jewish homes and all Jewish institutions in our community and throughout the world, connects us to our people’s past experiences and future expectations. It reminds us of the times in our history when we experienced God’s sustaining love and it marks our belief in a coming time when all people will find peace and security under God’s benevolent care. It also expresses our wish to experience God’s love within our own small worlds.

Our sukkah is a harvest booth. It reminds us of the simple, temporary shelters our ancestors in the land of Israel erected in the fields while they harvested the fall crops. It symbolizes for us our sense of thanksgiving for the blessings of food and sustenance provided for us by God’s good earth.

Our sukkah is a wanderer’s shelter. The time we spend in our sukkot during this festival ties us to our people who dwelt in booths during the forty years we wandered in the wilderness on our way to the Promised Land.

Our sukkah is a sacred space. It reminds us of our ancestors’ desert dwellings and represents the portable sanctuary they erected in the center of their camp to mark God’s abiding presence in their midst throughout all their journeys.

Finally, our sukkah is a place of hope. It is a symbol of that fragile canopy of peace, the sukkat shalom, that we beseech God to spread over us, over Israel and over the world each evening as we recite the Hashkiveinu prayer, our prayer for God’s protecting love.

Some have applied the image of the sukkah to the broad issues of war and peace, arguing, persuasively, I believe, that true security does not lie in ever more elaborate and destructive weapon systems but rather in the seemingly more risky task of breaking slowly and carefully through the walls of distrust and fear that separate us from our enemies. As we turn enemies into friends, we are slowly erecting God’s sukkat shalom, sukkah of peace. It is a structure that will ultimately provide more security than any military deterrence.

Our sukkah also bears a personal meaning for us as individuals. The structure represents the opportunity to experience shalom in our lives if we reach inward to ourselves and outward to others. We discover ourselves in God’s sukkah of peace when we run our lives honestly and creatively. Our hearts need to be open to others as our sukkah, with its loosely thatched roof, is open to the sky.

Our sukkah also reminds us that though there are risks in living in the open, there is also much joy. For many it is difficult to open their hearts and let other people share their lives. The sukkah is, therefore, a place to mingle with family and friends and to rejoice within its beautifully decorated walls.

In spite of all its spiritual significance, the sukkah also teaches us that we are to be modest in our spiritual claims. It reminds us that we are incapable of seeing and grasping everything. The sukkah allows us a view of the heavens, but the sukkah’s walls and roof allow us only a partial view.

The sukkah shows us that the possibility of experiencing divinity is always with us. Each year, as we enter into the physical sukkah to fulfill the mitzvah, commandment, of dwelling within the walls, we are reminded once again to enter into the spiritual sukkah in which we can discover God.

The sukkah, our abiding symbol of God’s nurturing love, confirms that the experience of that love is not far away from our usual dwellings. We do not retreat into the wilderness or go out into the fields to celebrate Sukkot. Our sukkot, festival booths, are just a few steps from our back door.

Just as on the festival we go out from the comfort of our homes to enter the sukkah, we need to leave the comfort of the settled land of our well-programmed concepts and well-patterned images and enter the uncharted wilderness of the spirit. We have to leave the security of the well-known dwellings of our hearts and minds to live in the beautiful tabernacle of new opportunities and growth. We have to come out from under the solid roof that normally shades our heads to catch a glimpse through the loosely placed branches that cover our sukkah of what is really lasting and ultimately valuable: God’s sukkat shalom, the shelter of peace and love that sustains and nurtures all.

Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah

“FOR A BLESSING AND NOT FOR A CURSE”

On the festival of Shimini Atzeret, Eighth Day of Assembly, which immediately follows Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, Jews throughout the world celebrate our historical connection to the Land of Israel by praying for rain to fall in our ancestral homeland. From Shimini Atzeret in the Fall until Pesach in the Spring we insert a verse in the second blessing of the Tefilah, the cycle of blessings that form the heart of our services, for the gift of rain. The theme of that blessing is God’s life-restoring power. So, for our ancestors this was the appropriate place to pray for the winter rains, which brought life back to the Land of Israel parched dry by the long hot summers.

Unlike the Egypt and Mesopotamia where the regular annual flooding of the river valleys insured the fertility of the land, the land of Israel depended on the less predictable rains. Our ancestors related rain in its due season with their covenantal relationship with God. Disobedience of the covenantal injunctions to be loyal to God and supportive of each other could lead to the withholding of rain and a period of hunger and dearth. Therefore, they associated their prayers for rain with the penitential theme of the High Holidays, the time in which Jews recommit themselves to our tradition – its values, practices and insights

In the Ashkenazi tradition, we introduce the prayers for rain with a piyyut, a religious poem, by the great poet Eliezer Kallir called “Geshem – Rain”. In this poem, the poet calls upon God to recall the loyalty of our ancestors and grace us, on their behalf, with the gift of rain. At the end of the poem and after the recitation of the additional verse which will be part of our Tefila for the next six months – “For You are the Eternal One, our God, who causes the wind to blow and the rain to descend” – we add a short litany:

For a blessing and not for a curse. Amen.

For life and not for death. Amen.

For plenty and not for famine. Amen.

These three lines could be a reflection on the unpredictably of nature Although rain is necessary, too much rain in the wrong place at the wrong time can be a disaster. Our ancestors were aware of the danger from flash floods in the wilderness, drenching rains that wash away seeds, late rains that the rot standing grain and tempests that sink ships and destroy buildings. Rain could also be a hindrance to commerce and an incontinence for pilgrims. Too little or too much rain, rain too early or too late could be a sign of Divine displeasure.

However, these lines could reflect the unreliability of human nature and how we use and, all too often, misuse the blessings we receive. While life requires that our basic needs be met, material wealth does not guarantee a meaningful and purposeful life. Jewish ethical teachings from the Bible on warn us of the spiritual challenges posed by prosperity – selfishness arrogance, and indulgence. To counter them, our tradition enjoins us, as individuals and as a community, to cultivate the middot (“qualities”) of gratitude, humility, and responsibility.

With Shemini Atzeret we bring our High Holiday season to a close. Our focus over the last few weeks has been on our moral and spiritual development. While we have celebrated the blessings of our world, we have sought to reconnect with creation’s ethical and spiritual foundations, which give meaning and significance to our lives. It is fitting, therefore, that we end the poem “Geshem” not with a prayer for the gift of rain so that we may be prosper but for the gift of wisdom so that we may employ our blessings for good. To reinforce this lesson, we dedicate the second day of Shemini Atzeret, which we call Simchat Torah, as our celebration of the Torah as our people’s overflowing source of this life-enhancing wisdom.

TAKING DOWN THE SUKKAH

Thoughts for the day after Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah

These days, it doesn’t take me very long to put up my sukkah. When it was new, it took me a while to figure out how the parts fit together, but now I have it down to a science. I lay the poles on the ground and connect them one by one to make the frame. Then I hang the tarpaulins that form the walls and place the bamboo mat on the top for the roof.

When that’s all done, I ask the kids to come in and decorate it. I am not entirely sure how it stays together each year but somehow the roof stays on, the decorations stay up and it is always a wonderful retreat to share with family and friends during the festival of Sukkot. After all, there is something about a sukkah that is miraculous.

More and more Jews are building sukkot these days. I guess they have come to the same realization as I that when we build a sukkah, we are creating something for ourselves and our families far more lasting than a temporary harvest festival booth. We are making memories.

I know that this is true for me because it now takes me much more time to take down my sukkah than to put it up. My sukkah has become a memory album and the day after Simchat Torah, that joyous festival that brings the fall holiday season to an end, has become a day on which I add this year’s new memories to those of years gone by.

My sukkah, like most everyone else’s, is not professionally decorated, but I find it beautiful. The knots and strings that hold it up also tie my life together. I hang the same plastic fruit from its roof that my family used for our sukkah when I was a child. Besides being reusable, plastic fruit has the advantage of neither rotting nor attracting bees, the bane of many sukkot.

I bought the sukkah itself the first Sukkot I spent in my old house in North Jersey about ten years ago. That house had a beautiful garden that gave my family and me great pleasure. But a sukkah is a timeless place and now when I enter my sukkah, part of me feels that I am still in that garden.

My sukkah is truly a place in which the years come together. I drape decorative chains of Rosh Hashanah cards from years gone by from the ceiling. I hang my children’s artwork from pre-school on the walls, and although the sukkah isn’t very big, there always seems to be room for their most recent work as well. I also hang up favorite illustrations from an old Jewish art calendar that I used when I did graduate work at Hebrew University in Jerusalem almost twenty-five years ago. I often think of the box in which I store all these decorations as a treasure chest.

There is a custom that during Sukkot we invite our biblical ancestors to join us in the sukkah to celebrate the holiday. I have found, however, that while I am in my sukkah, I am not only visited by such biblical heroes as Abraham and Sarah but also by all those, friends, and family, who have celebrated the holiday season with me in the past. Now, even though time and distance have taken them away from me, they still come, at least spiritually, to join me and my family in my sukkah. As I take down the walls of the sukkah, I feel as if I am saying good-bye to them for another year.

Dragging everything back into the garage, I think of the holidays that have just passed and realized how much strength and support I received during this sacred season. It is always thrilling to see so many of us gather together in the synagogue to celebrate the New Year. The sound of the shofar, the ancient melodies of Yom Kippur, the lulav and etrog of Sukkot, and the dancing and singing on Simchat Torah remind me that I am not alone. I am part of a small but wonderful people who have a glorious tradition and a wonderful outlook on life. The underlying message of our fall holidays is that it is great to be alive, the world is full of promise and God’s loving presence is never far away. The spirit of hope we bring to our worship and celebrations is very much part of my sukkah memories.

As I place my sukkah in a safe place in my garage, I know that I am also placing my memories in a safe place in my heart. I always have a sense of sadness as I put away my sukkah that day after Simchat Torah. But that sadness is tempered by the hope for a good new year, by the love of family and friends, by the memories I have stored in my sukkah, and by the understanding that Chanukah is really not that far away anymore.

L’Shanah Tova — May we all be blessed with a good 5760.

Chanukah

MATT OF MODEIN

December 6, 2000

Al Ha-Nissim

Don’t forget,

Old men are dangerous!

With little to lose,

And a world to gain,

And not a lot of space in between,

They’re stronger than you’d think

If you get them angry

Or cross their path

You’d know it

I guess.

Not in the little things

They’re beyond that stuff

But for things that really matter

Like truth and honor

Family and home,

And love and God,

They might even kick a king

In his ass.

Mattathias is not a good name for a hero. It is too long. It sounds too soft. It lacks punch and verve. Though it may be an accurate English rendering of the Greek form of the Hebrew name Mattityahu, the power of the Hebrew name is lost in the translation.

I prefer calling the first hero of the Chanukah story, Judah Maccabee’s father and the first successfully to mobilize the Jews to revolt against Antiochus’ oppressive regime, “Matt of Modein.” Now that is a good name for a patriarchal figure who reminds me of Ben Cartwright of the old television western Bonanza — a wise, powerful, action-oriented, community-minded man with a household of strong and brave sons. Like the fictional Ben Cartwright, Matt of Modein could size up a situation and take decisive and inspiring action.

The name “Matt of Modein,” far more than the name “Mattathias,” captures the full force of the Hebrew name, “Mattityahu” — “Gift of the Lord” — and changes the way we picture this courageous old man. Envisioning Mattathias as “Matt of Modein,” the old man who wielded God’s mighty staff, helps us see him as our ancestors saw him, and gives us a model of aging from within the Jewish tradition that is not that of the sage or of the zadye.

The historical Matt of Modein, Mattityahu of the Hasmonean family, was the de-facto leader in the Judean town of Modein, a small city between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Sea. Although the family did not live in Jerusalem, where the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy Temple, was located, the Hasmonai family were cohanim, members of the priestly tribe, and were loyal to the traditions and customs of the Jewish people.

At this time, the land of Israel was one of many provinces of a kingdom centered in present-day Syria, ruled by descendants of one of Alexander the Great’s generals. At the time of the Chanukah story, the ruler of the kingdom was Antiochus IV. The king sponsored reforms throughout his dominion. His goal was to promote unity in his wide-flung empire by imposing Greek cultural, political, and religious forms on the various cultural and ethnic groups under his rule. For the Jews of the land of Israel, this primarily meant that Greek-style polytheistic worship would replace the worship of our One God, that Greek educational institutions and curricula would replace the traditional Jewish ones, and that Greek administrative practices would replace the Jews’ traditional political autonomy.

When Antiochus’ soldiers came to Modein to implement the reform program, they naturally approached the town’s leading citizen, the aged Mattityahu. Matt refused to participate. Moreover, when another man, who hoped to curry favor with the occupiers, stepped forward to lead the town in the worship of the Greek gods, Matt of Modein stepped up and struck him down. Calling on all those who were loyal to God and the Torah, Mattityahu raised the banner of revolt (I Maccabees 2:19-28). He was truly God’s gift to the Jewish people.

Matt of Modein was not the first to resist Antiochus’ reforms. There were others, such as a brave mother and her seven sons and Eleazar, the old priest, who accepted martyrdom rather than submit to the king’s demands, but Matt’s involvement changed the nature of the revolt. He had inspiring leadership skills. It was he who gathered the guerilla army, with which, after his death, his son Judah Maccabee liberated Jerusalem (I Maccabees 2:42-48). He was also an inspiring religious figure. He had the courage to change Jewish law to fit the needs of the time. For example, he decreed that Jews must defend themselves with weapons when attacked on the Shabbat (I Maccabees 2:39-41).

Although Mattityahu died in 166 B.C.E., during the first year of the revolt, his bravery and leadership inspired our people during their long struggle for freedom. Of all the Maccabees, only Mattityahu, Matt of Modein, is mentioned in our liturgy (cf. the prayer, Al HaNissim, “For the Miracles”) and cherished as a courageous and loyal Jew by our sages (Exodus. Rabba 15:6; B. Megillah 11a).

For us today, Matt of Modein remains an inspiring figure. He teaches us that age is no barrier when it comes to physical bravery, spiritual courage, and charismatic leadership. No matter how old we may be or feel, Matt of Modein reminds us that we can change our world — that what we do, matters. His bravery shows us that we consist of stronger stuff than we may think. We are blessed that there are still people today who, like Matt of Modein so long ago, still exhibit the strength of a guiding, protecting, and inspiring “Gift of God.”

PURIM

PURIM'S MESSIANIC MESSAGE

Purim 5766

February 22, 2006

“And the Jews experienced light and happiness, joy and honor” (Esther 8:16) this short verse near the end of the Megillat Esther, the Scroll of Esther, captures the abiding promise of hope our ancestors found in that biblical book. To our people, the Scroll of Esther is more than a historical romance set in the early years of the Persian Empire and even more than the account of a miraculous tale of our deliverance from a heartless aggressor. We cherish our history and the sacred legends that tie us to our past, but as Jews, it is our tendency to look forward rather than back. At best, the great events of our past serve as a source of courage and inspiration as we use our experience over time to train ourselves to face the future with faith and trust.

As a people, we are survivors and Purim is one of the many Jewish holidays that celebrate survival. We read the story of Purim in the Scroll of Esther, rooting for Esther, cheering Mordechai, laughing at King Ahasuerus, and drowning out the wicked Haman’s name with boos and noisemakers. We send gifts of sweet treats to our friends. We reach out our hand to the needy. We rejoice until our spirits transcend the confines of this passing world. We pray that as the Jews of ancient Persia “experienced light and happiness, joy and honor”, we and our children should be so blessed and be freed of our enemies forever.

Purim is a holiday that expresses our hope in a better world. It is a holiday with a messianic vision. Our sages of old promise us that in the Messianic Period all of the holidays except for Purim will be abolished and all the prophetic books and the sacred writings in our Bible, the Nevi'im and Ketuvim, except for Megillat Esther, will disappear.

The story of Purim is the eternal story of God’s saving care for Israel and the good people of the world and the Megillat Esther can be read as an apocalyptic allegory. Haman the descendent of Agag, a king of the Amalekites, our archetypical enemy, is overthrown. Mordechai, dressed in royal robes, becomes king of the Jews, a messiah, and with his cousin, Esther, Queen of Persia, the Shekinah, God’s abiding presence, rules the world on behalf of the Ahasuerus, the hidden king of the king of kings. On Purim, we celebrate our ultimate deliverance and feast and rejoice, as we will do at the banquet, which, as our sages assure us, will introduce the messianic age.

Purim is not the only day during the year in which we stress the messianic vision hidden in the Megillat Esther. We recall this hope and dream every week as we say farewell to the Shabbat with Havdalah, the Ritual of Separation.

We understand the Shabbat as a foretaste of the World to Come. As our Shabbat comes to an end, we look forward to a time when the peace of Shabbat will fill all creation, and love and mercy will reign throughout the world. Through our prayers – the gestures and the words – we rededicate ourselves to this commanding commitment. We hope that our experience of the Shabbat, the day of rest, and the foretaste of the world to come, will carry us through the coming workdays until the next Shabbat or the beginning of the messianic age, whichever comes first.

Our Siddur, prayer book, is filled with passages from the TaNaK, our Holy Scriptures. Verses from the Torah, the Prophetic Books, the Book of Psalms fill our prayers. However, we rarely cite the Megillat Esther in our prayers. One noticeable exception is in the series of Biblical Verses that introduce the three blessings of Havdalah; the blessings over the wine, the spices, and the twisted candle. As we recite that prayer we read the passage from the Megillah that describes our ancestors’ exhilaration at being saved from Haman’s plot, “And the Jews experienced light and happiness, joy and honor” (Esther 8:16).

We do not end our prayer there, however. We add the phrase “so may it be for us” expressing the hope that soon we may experience the joy of the final redemption. Then, perhaps with a subtle reference to the custom of enjoying wine on Purim, we take the wine glass and say, “I lift the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Eternal (Psalm) and begin the first of the three blessings, the blessing over the wine.

The Megillat Esther is a wonderful story. It is filled with intrigue and suspense, lust, love, and violence. It gives a glimpse into the court life of ancient Persia. It is a story of bravery and daring. It tells of great danger and great deliverance. It contains some of the most memorable characters of our Bible. It is a story that thrills young and old. But beyond its literary merits and its historical significance, it is a story, as it has been read by our people over the centuries, that tells us not only of events in the distant past but strengthens us with hope for a better future for us, for the people Israel and for all the world.

PURIM: A REFLECTION ON POWER
March 18, 2003

Power of any kind is a dangerous blessing. Individuals and nations need power to ensure their own survival and promote their own welfare and the welfare of those with whom they come into contact. But power can easily be abused. We can employ the same energy that enables us to do good, to do all sorts of evil. We cannot live without power, but power can destroy us. We need to learn how to use our power for the good. This has been one of the abiding goals of Jewish spiritual teachings over the ages and is a focus of the Festival of Purim.

The Megillah, the Scroll of Esther, the biblical book that is the source for our joyous festival of Purim, revolves around issues of political power and military force. It is a story that recalls how the Jews of the ancient Persian Empire drew on their political acumen, their martial power, their sense of shared destiny, and their deep faith in each other to ensure their survival in challenging times. As we celebrate the miracle of Jewish continuity, the Megillah reminds us that economic, political, and military power are important components in our struggle for survival. On Purim we remember that only when might and power are justly employed, can we experience the Holy One’s saving and redeeming spirit.

Unlike all the other great biblical narratives in which God is a central character, the Holy One plays no explicit role in the Scroll of Esther. In the scroll, as it is in life, God’s presence is hidden. In our lives we evoke God’s spirit in the manner in which we respond to life’s challenges. Likewise, in the Megillah we discover God’s saving power not through some great miracle but through the courage of Esther to stand before the wicked prime minister, Haman, and in the willingness of the Jews to stand up to their enemies and defend their homes and families.

At first the Megillah does not seem to be a book about the uses and abuses of power. It begins as a historical romance. We are caught by surprise when it turns from a love story into a story of political intrigue and bloody conflict. The opening chapters, which tell of the expulsion of Vasti, King Ahasuerus’ first wife and the beauty contest worthy of a present-day reality TV show to select a new one, lull us into expecting a story of romantic intrigue. With the selection of Esther as the new queen, we want to know if a Jewish orphan can find happiness as mistress of the royal court. Will the course of true love run true? We will never know.

Almost immediately, the mood of the story changes. New characters come to the forefront -- Mordecai, Esther’s guardian and kinsman, and Haman the Agagite, the new royal vizier. Powerful human emotions of lust, power, pride, and greed come into play as the protagonists struggle to overcome each other. The story ends not with a romantic reconciliation but with a bloody military victory that confirms Jewish power and ensures Jewish survival. Esther and Mordecai expose Haman’s plot to slaughter the Jews and the Jews, dispersed throughout the empire, defend themselves and their families. On the thirteenth of Adar, the very day chosen by Haman for their destruction, the Jews assail their enemies and kill seventy-five thousand of their foes.

Three times the Megillah uses the motif of feasting to help us examine the use and abuse of power. The book opens with a description of King Ahasuerus’ feasts for the elite of his empire and for the people of his capital, Susa. For Ahasuerus great feasts provide him with the opportunity to parade his glory and authority in front of his satraps and people. The Persian king uses power is a tool to support his need for domination and his lusty appetites. Although it led to her dismissal, Queen Vashti’s refusal to dance before the king underscores the shallowness of his concerns.

The two private dinner parties Esther hosts for the King and the upstart prime minister Haman provide a second occasion for the Megillah to focus on the use of power. In his preparations for the feasts, Haman demonstrates his understanding of political power as a means for self-aggrandizement and for revenge. Yet this is his downfall. To reveal Haman’s plot to the king, Esther cleverly exploits Haman’s ego needs.

The festive celebrations of the Jews decreed by Mordecai and Esther in honor of their unexpected deliverance present a third understanding of the uses of power. For the Jews and their leaders political and military power were not implements for domination or personal advancement. They were tools to be used to ensure personal and communal survival in a very dangerous world. Unlike Ahasuerus and Haman who hoped to despoil the Jews for their own personal needs, the Jews, led by Mordecai, sought no material reward from the spoils of battle.

In a highly entertaining manner, the Megillah directs our thoughts to the very serious concern about the use of power. Reading the Scroll of Esther carefully, we can see negative examples in which power was used to indulge one’s appetites and to threaten and oppress others. But we also see a positive example in which political and military power helped overthrow a tyrant and save our people. The Megillah exposes us to the abuses of power and to its benefits. When we use the power we have properly, we are able to transform our lives and the lives of others for the better. As we listen to the Megillah this year, may Mordecai and Esther teach us how to use the power we have not for selfish gains but to help ourselves and others enjoy the blessings of freedom and security.

SEFIRAT HA-OMER

WHICH WILL IT BE?

Sefirat Ha-Omer, the dramatic harvest countdown, may still bring feast or famine

According to the Torah, our ancient ancestors were required to bring daily a certain measure of grain known as an omer to the Temple during the forty-nine days between the beginning of Pesach and the celebration of Shavuot. In Israel, in ancient days as today, the period between these two festivals was the time of the grain harvest. At this season at the time when the Temple stood, our ancestors would give thanks each day for each successful day of the harvest and pray that the following days and weeks would remain successful.

The forty-nine days during which our people presented daily an omer of freshly harvested grain was a time of mixed feelings — the joy of fields full of ripened grain and the fear that the grain might not all be successfully brought in. Our ancestors were keenly aware of the hazards of agricultural life at the time of the harvest. Rain, fire, harsh wind, vermin, locusts — all could destroy the crop while it was still in the field and all their labors would have been in vain.

During these forty-nine days, they realized how fragile prosperity could be. The seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot were a time of serious concern. For pious and for superstitious reasons, our ancestors avoided expressions of joy and undue frivolity. Their fate was too uncertain for them to allow themselves to celebrate until the harvest was safely put away.

Shavuot the holiday that marked the end of the harvest was, therefore, a joyous festival. The crop was in. The silos were filled with grain. Our Israelite forbears could face the dry months of summer with a feeling of security. Shavuot was a festival that celebrated the end of a period of anxiety.

Living in a modern, urban world, we have lost touch with the basic human concerns that touched the lives of our ancestors. We no longer sense how closely our lives are connected to the cycles of nature and the seasons of the year. We no longer tell time by the phases of the moon nor search the skies for rain clouds. Just as we can no longer feel the sharpness of their fears, we can no longer share the intensity of their rejoicing. As so Shavuot has become a minor festival, a passing note on our calendars and in our lives and the counting of the omer, custom only for the most pious.

Yet, the same concerns for economic well being and security that plagued our ruler ancestors still plague us. Like us, they were concerned with putting food on the table, having a cushion for hard times, being able to celebrate the great events of their lives, and saving for old age. Their economic system differed from ours. Their vocabulary seems somewhat strange. But the deep, human concerns remain the same.

For the past few years, our country has been undergoing a major economic transformation. Many of our old expectations are being tested and dropped.

We seem, to be working harder with reduced success and reduced satisfaction. There continue to be major, mergers of large firms. Belt-tightening cost control and staff reductions are the words of the day. More of us are looking for jobs and that search is taking longer. The income gap is widening. Many of us are wondering when and if we will enjoy the harvest of our labors.

As a nation and as a world we, are figuratively in the period of Sefirat Ha Omer, the time of counting the omer We have experienced once again the feelings of economic uncertainty and financial worry As individuals and as a community we have learned that our success and security is often due to factors beyond our control — the rain, wind and fire of modern economic life. We continue to work hard. We hope. We pray.

Shavuot is coming and afterward the long warm days of summer, a time of hope and happiness. As we approach the festival and the new season, we look forward to when our worries will be over, when we will all benefit from our new world economy, when we feel secure in our jobs, in our retirement, and in our ability to provide for our loved ones. We anxiously await the time when we can say, “The harvest is safely in, we can relax, rejoice and enjoy.” May it come soon.

The Jewish Community Voice APRIL 24, 1996

Volume 55, No. 17

Shavuot

THE TOUGH COMMANDMENT

Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the LORD your God: you shall not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements. For in six days, the LORD made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.

Exodus 20: 8-11 (the 4th Commandment – New JPS)

Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, commemorates the giving of the Torah, specifically, the Decalogue. For many, the Decalogue represents what it means to be a good person. People often say that even though they may not be religious, the Ten Commandments guide their lives.. For Jews, this is only a starting place. In our tradition the Decalogue is not the full expression of Jewish spiritual life and moral teaching, but an outline of Jewish concerns.

The Two Tablets of the Law are powerful markers of Jewish presence. Often they stand above the Aron Kodesh reminding us that the Torah scrolls stored within contain the words first heard by our people at Sinai and transmitted over time through a process of discussion and debate. They remind us of God’s unity, the transformative experience of the Exodus, the sacredness of the family, and the choices we need to make to live in peace with our neighbors.

Yet the Fourth Commandment, the commandment designating the Seventh Day, the Shabbat, as a day of rest for all members of our community, presents a description of that community that fundamentally differs from our vision of Jewish community. The commandment to observe the Shabbat was first heard a society in which women and children were subordinate to men and, even more disturbing, that accepted slavery as a norm. Even though Torah law and subsequent Jewish legislation seek to protect slaves from abusive situations, the fact that in the Decalogue slavery appears as a societal institution just as marriage, family, property, and government is inescapable.

The Decalogue is a summary of the Torah, pointing us to many of the significant concerns that will be taken up in the rest of scripture and discussed by Jews throughout the generations. The ways in which we understand basic social structures – marriage, family, property, government – have changed over the centuries, but the wisdom first expressed in Torah still enriches our understanding of them.

Slavery is different. No responsible Jewish thinker today would attempt to justify slavery on Biblical or other grounds. As Jews, a people, more likely to be slaves than to own slaves, and in light of the history of slavery in America, the claim that the core text of God’s revelation, the Decalogue, was concerned only with the welfare of slaves is, at best, historically interesting. The fact that apologists for slavery, among them Jews, used this passage to justify slavery is profoundly disturbing. From our contemporary perspective, it is clear that slavery is prohibited by Torah.

Yet, we cannot excise the uncomfortable verses from the Torah nor insert a new commandment “Thou shalt not enslave another person” into the Decalogue. However, when faced with troubling passages, our tradition calls us to find deeper meanings that overrule a simple reading of the text. Jews read the Torah as a self-critical and self-correcting text.

The understanding that all are free is implicit in the Decalogue. The reasons given for observing Shabbat undercut its apparent acceptance of slavery. If the Shabbat commemorates God’s liberation of the Jews from Egyptian bondage (Deuteronomy 5:15), how can we re-enslave someone already freed by God? If the Shabbat memorializes God’s creation of a world designed for those created in God’s likeness (Exodus 20:11), how can we honor God while holding someone one who bears God’s image, in bondage?

As Jews, we do not read the Torah literally. It has always been an interpreted text. It contains eternal truths embedded in specific human contexts. While we cannot rewrite scripture, we are always re-reading it; finding new passages to cherish and setting aside older choices, which now seem to blind us to the Torah’s higher and deeper truths including the truth that God created all people to be free.

SHAVUOT: RENEWING TORAH'S MESSAGE

On Shavuot we celebrate Torah, the living spiritual and ethical heritage of our people, as a gift given to us freely, to be used wisely and to be passed down lovingly. The Torah’s source is love whether we see it as a gift from God or a precious heritage bequeathed to us from those who have preceded us or both. Within our Torah tradition we discover both the ideals to which we are committed and how we make those ideals real in our lives. Torah provides us with a guide to use as we respond to the blessings and trials of our lives and Torah grows as we use its insights with wisdom and grace.

The spiritual challenge of Shavuot is not how we received our Torah but what are we going to do with it. Generations of Jews have heard the divine voice speaking to them through the Torah tradition. How do we hear that voice today and how are we going to respond to it? How will we employ Torah’s words, insights, images, and metaphors to guide our commitment to Torah’s fundamental mitzvot, “directives”: to love God and to love our fellow human beings.

While this has always been our challenge, the current crisis presents new opportunities for us as individuals and as a community to show that Torah still speaks to us in life-enhancing ways. As we listen to our people’s teachings, we can hear God’s voice in ways that speak to us in terms we understand. In honoring our ancestral traditions, we find the wisdom to follow God’s directions down new and renewed pathways as we respond to the crisis of today

First of all we need to care for ourselves and others. Torah directs us always to be careful and make our homes and workplaces safe. Following the thoughtful advice from medical and public health experts is a mitzvah grounded in Torah. We need to see ourselves and others not as independent actors but as cherished members of communities in which we care for and depend on each other.

Now that for many of us our homes have also become our workplaces and schoolrooms, Jewish visions of our homes as a miniature version of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem direct us to see where we live as places filled with God’s holiness. We need to preserve their physical and spiritual purity. Maintaining Shalom Bayit, “the well-being of our household”, is of utmost importance.

Support for the sick and the poor has always played a central role in Jewish life. While many of us are unable to participate in the hands-on activities of care, we can still reach out to others through the miracles of modern electronic communications. Money is still needed to provide food for the hungry and to support those whose livelihoods have been impacted by the pandemic.

Torah principles of tzedakah, “the directive to restore equity and balance in the world”, and gemilut chasadim, “the imperative to reach out to all in need”, are especially important at this time.

Building and sustaining community is a strong Torah principle. Jews recall the revelation at Sinai as a communal experience. In our shared imagination all generations of our people stood at Sinai. This sense of a spiritual gathering over time and space gives deep meaning to our ability to sustain community thought various forms of remote communications. While there is great power in being together in the same place at the same time, we have come to learn that even a minyan, a “prayer quorum of ten”, can emerge when we share prayer time even though we do not share prayer space.

Our Torah is a gift to be shared with all those we touch and an inheritance to be handed down from generation to generation. Each of us has the opportunity to add the wisdom of our lives to this precious tradition.

On this Shavuot, the celebration of the gift of Torah, we can use the challenges of the moment to enhance our timeless tradition. Be safe, Be healthy, be blessed. Chag Sameiach.

Tisha B’Av

TISHA B'AV - THE JEWISH MEMORIAL DAY

The Fast of the Ninth of the Jewish month of Av, Tisha b’Av, marks the end of a three week period of mourning during which our people remember the series of events that led to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of our people’s first Temple on that date in the year 586 BCE. Sadly, it also marks the day some six hundred years later in the year 70 CE when the Roman legions pushed through the crumbling defenses of Jerusalem to desecrated and destroyed the rebuilt second Temple, as they crushed a rebellion that shook the heart of the Empire and drove our people into exile. Over time, our people associated many of the most painful moments with this grim day.

Traditionally, Tisha B’Av was a dark day of mourning as we cried over our losses and bewailed our exile. On Tisha B’Av, we felt most keenly our sense of powerlessness and our feeling of separation from our spiritual center in our ancestral homeland. It was the day on which we acknowledged the emotional and spiritual pain of our people’s exile.

But today, we are no longer in exile. Our people have returned to our ancient homeland and rebuilt our towns and cities. We are no longer powerless. Our world has changed and our needs have changed. To speak to us today, Tisha B’Av can no longer be the day on which we remember all the evil that has happened to us. It needs to become the day on which we understand that despite our setbacks, our struggles, our real losses, and deep suffering, we, the Jewish people, have overcome the obstacles fate has set before us. Our existence today is a triumph of our people’s spirit. Any commemoration of Tisha B’Av that does not acknowledge this reality is inadequate. There is something miraculous about the Jewish people, our culture, and our faith.

We no longer need to find ways to mourn our losses but need to discover new paths to cherish all that we have gained. Thank God, our chief worry is not being crushed in our weakness but becoming arrogant and careless with our success and power. We need to enhance our sense of appreciation for the blessings that we have. We must not take for granted and foolishly lose all that for generations we could only obtain in our dreams. A renewed and transformed Tisha B’Av commemoration can help us greatly in this task.

We need to refocus Tisha B’Av from a day of Jewish mourning to a Jewish memorial day. Let us transform it to a day on which we can solemnly acknowledge all those of our people who over the centuries accepted hardship, experienced sorrow, and even suffered death so that we, the Jewish people, could survive. Let us make Tisha B’Av the day on which we give thanks to them for their loyalty to our people and our faith and the day on which we renew our commitment to the heritage they so lovingly and painfully bequeathed to us.

We, the Jewish people, are survivors and the descendants of survivors. Let us not forget all those who over the countless generations of our people kept the faith in our God, in our Torah, and in each other. Let us not forget to honor their struggles but, also, let us, also, not forget to celebrate their gifts.

THE FAST OF TISHHA B'AV

Why should we observe the Fast of Tisha B’Av, the Fast of the Ninth day of the Jewish month of Av? Why should we insist on remembering all the sad and depressing events commemorated by the fast? Isn’t life difficult enough without spending time mourning ancient losses? These questions have been raised by Jews throughout history.

Centuries ago the Talmud suggested an answer to these questions. It relates the saying of our sages that those who eat and drink on the Ninth of Av will not participate in the celebration of Jerusalem’s restoration, while all those who mourn for the lost Jerusalem will be privileged to be part of the celebration of her coming rebirth (Ta’anit 30b). The Talmud cites the following biblical verse from the prophet Isaiah as support:

       Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad for her,
       All you who love her!
       Join in her jubilation,
       All you who mourned over her!
           (Isaiah 66:10)

The Talmudic statement may seem harsh and difficult to accept. Are we to believe that our ancient sages really want to make our personal experience of redemption, our participation in the celebration of Jerusalem’s restoration, dependent upon the ritual act of fasting? That is not the way rituals function in Jewish life. They are not magic. Their purpose is to change our hearts and souls, not to change the facts of our external world. The Talmudic sages understood this, so surely their statement must have a deeper meaning.

I believe we can glean this deeper meaning from the Biblical book of Lamentations, a short collection of five poetic elegies mourning the fall of the Temple to the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., traditionally recited during the Fast of Tisha B’Av. With Lamentations’ powerful description of the anguish, pain, and despair, the sages are conveying much more than the simplistic message of no fast, no redemption. They are making the stronger claim that if one does not feel the significance of the Fast of the Ninth of Av, Tisha B’Av, one cannot truly understand Judaism and fully share in the dreams, hopes, and disappointments of the Jewish people.

Our sages inform us that Tisha B’Av is more than the anniversary of a tragic historical event, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Rather Tisha B’Av also marks a major breakthrough in Jewish spiritual development. Tisha B’Av is the day on which we are to grapple with the reality of human sinfulness and the implications of human evil. On the Ninth of Av, we are to try to make ourselves aware of the imperfections of our world. Our fasting is to serve as a reminder that our world is so far from the state of shalom, the sense of being full and complete, that God allowed his holy place in our holy city to be destroyed.

Each tragic event in our people’s history that has been associated with this day — the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman general Titus in 70 C.E., the attacks against the Jews during the Crusades and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 C.E., and others — sharpens that message. On a spiritual level, the destruction of our holy Temples, our exile from our land and all the troubles we, as a people, have endured are indications of the wickedness of all humanity. We fast to mourn our own losses and the losses of all others who have been oppressed.

The rituals of Tisha B’Av — fasting, reading the biblical poems of mourning, reciting the elegies composed in honor of lost Jewish communities, sitting on stools, praying in semi-darkness — all sensitize our souls to the experience of destruction and dispersion. On Tisha B’Av we receive the valuable lesson that no matter how comfortable we personally may be, there were, and still are, times in our people’s lives and in the lives of all people, that the suffering we recall is not a faint memory, but a bitter reality.

The Book of Lamentations ends with a plea that God renew our days as of old (Lamentations 5:21). Our ancient sages understood that if we were to forget the depth of our loss, we could never appreciate the significance of our future restoration. They were afraid that we might become complacent in our present situation, and forget our past sufferings, ignore the pains of others and stop dreaming for and working towards a better future. So on Tisha B’Av we are directed to fast and to mourn in the hope that, through reliving our sorrow, we will continue dreaming, praying and striving for a better world in which shalom, peace, is a reality for all people, and eventually experience God’s full presence restored to the earth in the Temple that the prophet Isaiah envisioned as the House of Prayer for All Peoples (Isaiah 56:7).

THE MIRACLE OF TISHA B'AV

Our people dedicate Tisha B'Av, the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, as the solemn fast day to honor our martyrs and to commemorate the tragic events of our history. Tisha B'Av plays a special role among the sacred days of the generally upbeat and joyous Jewish year. It marks the end of a three-week season of mourning that focuses our attention on the events that led to the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. As we recall those dark days, our hearts turn to other times of grief in our people’s history. However, despite our dark memory of pain and loss, our grief does not immobilize us. Instead, we marvel at our people’s spiritual strength and creativity. Our ancestors responded to the misfortunes commemorated on Tisha B'Av in ways that expanded the spiritual bonds that connect us to each other, our world, and our God.

The fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and the subsequent exile to Babylon impelled our people to consolidate our sacred traditions into the words of the Torah and our prophetic books. The Jewish mystical tradition, Kabbalah, blossomed as a response to a series of expulsions from various Western European lands culminating in the banishment of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The disappointments and tragedies of the modern world gave birth to the rich diversity in contemporary Jewish religious and cultural life and provided the foundations for the return of our people to the Land of Israel.

Of all the calamities we recall on Tisha B'Av, the most significant was of the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. This catastrophe challenged our people and our teachers. How could Jews, individually and communally, feel God’s presence in their lives after the loss of God’s earthly home? How could a repentant person or nation still experience atonement, the feeling of being once again at one with God?

Even though few Jews had the opportunity to experience first hand the rites and rituals of the Temple, knowing that they were taking place provided the assurance that there was a place in our world where heaven and earth touched. The sacrifices and prayers offered there enabled people to connect to the God who was always ready to welcome all who turned in repentance.

The response of our teachers and sages was so insightful, that we often take it for granted. Drawing on insights embedded in the teachings of our Torah and prophets, they taught us that contact with God continues through acts of loving-kindness. As we incorporate the wisdom of Scripture and tradition into our lives, we transcend those attitudes and actions that separate us from God. Our rabbis showed us that the point of connection between God and the people Israel was not found in Jerusalem’s Temple but in the words of Torah, which we enshrine in our hearts and make real by our deeds.

Once, our sages teach us, as R. Yohanan was walking out of Jerusalem, R. Joshua followed him. When Rabbi Joshua saw the Temple in ruins, he said: “Woe unto us that this place is destroyed, the place where atonement was made for Israel’s iniquities!”

Rabbi Yohanan kindly replied, “My son, do not grieve. We have another means of atonement which is just as effective.”

“What is it?” Rabbi Joshua asked.

Rabbi Yohanan answered, “It is deeds of loving-kindness, concerning which the Scripture (Hosea 6:6) has already said, “I desire loving-kindness and not sacrifice” (from Avot DeRabi Natan 4)T

This is the great wonder of Tisha B'Av. While tragedies have submerged other nations, our people, though challenged, have moved ahead. While not blindly clinging to the past, we drew from our heritage and created new ways of living Jewish lives that responded creatively to the new world into which we were cast. The hallmark of our people’s creative spiritual survival is that once we made the shift, it felt so natural, so true, and so obvious that our spiritual bonds to each other, our world and our God seemed stronger and deeper than ever before.

RENEW OUR DAYS AS OF OLD

On Tisha Be Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, in 586 B.C.E., the armies of Babylon ravished Jerusalem and destroyed Solomon’s temple. Six and a half centuries later, on the same day, in the year 70 C.E. the Roman legions sacked our holy city and burned the rebuilt sanctuary. With the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, Jewish political independence came to an end, and, for almost the next 2,000 years, we were a nation without a state, a people subject to others’ rule even in our ancient homeland.

Ever since then Tisha B'Av has been the national day of mourning for the Jewish people. It is the yahrtzeit for the Beit Ha Mikash, the Temple, and for all our anonymous brothers and sisters who perished in those dark days so long ago. The events we remember on Tisha Be Av were painful turning points in our people’s history and we still carry their scars in our collective memory. But as we mourn our losses, we also remember the courage of those who lived through the tragedies with a renewed faith in the wisdom and traditions of our people. On Tisha Be Av we reach back through time to recall their struggles and their agony and to grasp on to their dreams, their aspirations, their highest values and deepest commitments with the hope that what sustained them in their times of trial will continue to be a blessing for us.

Tisha Be Av is a fast day. As we approach the sad commemoration, we limit our opportunities to rejoice. Starting three weeks before Tisha Be Av, we no longer celebrate weddings. From the first of Av many of us adopt a meatless diet and on the ninth day, Tisha Be Av, we fast. We gather in our synagogues for the evening and morning services and sit barefoot on the floor or on low benches. We read the biblical book of Lamentations, a collection of five psalms, traditionally ascribed to the prophet Jeremiah who lived through the Babylonia invasion, mourning the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, as well as other dirges recalling the other tragedies that befell our people throughout our history.

The psalms of Lamentations are powerful statements of grief and despair. As we chant the verses, we hear our people’s collective pain. The words describe our ancestors’ sorrow and loss, their shame and confusion, and their anger and dismay. The voices behind Lamentations tell us that they have sinned and that incompetent leaders lead them astray. They reveal to us what it means to be abandoned by friends and allies and how it feels to be confronted by God’s anger.

These are difficult words to hear. It is not an easy process to recall our pain, to think about those we have lost, and still cherish the blessings and spiritual resources they passed down to us. But we cannot avoid our past. We cannot hide from our pain. It is part of us. It is part of our history.

The annual commemoration of Tisha B'Av shows us how our people have dealt with national tragedies. The fast directs us to honor our losses but also helps us realize that we are more than our pain. Our anguish has not nor does not define us. Our ancestors found the strength to rebuild Jewish life despite their tribulations. On Tisha Be Av we declare that we have surely suffered but we are not victims. We are the children of survivors and they have given us a sacred vision of a better world.

For our ancestors the loss of the Temple was devastating. For them, our Temple stood for something transcendent and transforming. It was more than the national shrine in the capital city. They pictured Jerusalem and its sanctuary as the sacred heart of our people and the source of Torah, God’s word for us and all people. The Temple symbolized God’s presence in our world and expressed the dream of a time when all humanity would be bound in peace under divine sovereignty and the primal unity of humanity would be restored. The Temple could be destroyed but not their vision of a renewed and restored creation.

Today even though the Temple remains standing only in our spiritual imagination and Jerusalem is a modern city with traffic jams and trash disposal problems, they continue to be a source of inspiration for us as they were for the generations that preceded us. Our sacred books and traditions which have withstood the trials of our history remain grounded in that hope. The struggles of our parents and grandparents and all our ancestors to use our heritage and renew it to build meaningful Jewish lives for themselves and their children testify to the power of that dream.

The final verses of the Book of Lamentations capture that hopeful, healing vision. It concludes with the dream that all the relationships – our connection to our God, our land, our neighbors, and each other – broken by Jerusalem’s destruction will be restored. Even though the Book of Lamentations is rarely cited in our worship service, we recite these hopeful words whenever we return the Torah to the ark. “Turn us to You, Dear God, and let us return, Renew our days as of old.” (Lamentations 5:21) This ancient hope for renewal and restoration is underscored by the vision of our teachers of old that in the time to come, Tisha B'Av will mark the dawn of redemption.

OUR SUSTAINING HOPE

TishaBe’Av and Shabbat Nachamu

The great miracle of Jewish survival is not that we survived great tragedies. It is that we survived as a community ever faithful to its vision of a better world for us and for all people and not as an angry and embittered tribe.

When we look at Jewish responses to the tragedies of our past, the abiding sense emerges that despite the great disasters, the unbelievable suffering, the unbearable pain, the overwhelming sense of loss, we never believed that our God abandoned us. We never gave up hope.

When we asked where our God was, our response was that God is with us in our suffering. We did not feel alone but sensed that even after the fall of Jerusalem and through all the centuries of wandering, the Holy One went into exile with us to comfort us, inspire us and give us hope.

The foundations for this remarkable reaction to suffering appear in the biblical responses to the first great tragedy our people experienced, the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem, the destruction of our Temple and the exile of our people more than twenty-five centuries ago. In the writings of our prophets, particularly Isaiah of the Exile, we see visions of hope rising out of the ashes of destruction.

Of course, we grieved our losses and we still remember that grief. Even today, on the fast day of Tisha B’Av, the Ninth Day of the Month of Av, the anniversary of that tragedy, and of so many others, we sit as mourners on stools in a darkened room and recite the five psalms that make up the biblical Book of Lamentations. We do not pretend that tragedy has not touched our lives, but Tisha B’Av, which marks the end of a period of sadness reliving the events leading up to the fall of Jerusalem, also marks the end of our period of grief. Our Jewish liturgy and calendar do not let us remain in mourning.

We call the Shabbat immediately after Tisha B’Av, Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of Comfort. This name comes from the opening words of the Haftara for that Shabbat which was written by the Prophet Isaiah of the Exile to our exiled ancestors. Isaiah challenged our ancestors to be comforted and consoled and to maintain hope despite their loss. Evoking the Exodus from Egypt, the prophet describes the return of our people from exile to the Holy Land and the Holy City.

We were angry at what had happened to us and, in dark moments, dreamed of revenge. Psalm 137, the lament of the exiles in Babylon, looks forward to the violent overthrow of Babylon, the proud capital of our oppressors. But our prophets helped our people look beyond our anger and desire for revenge. They accepted a mission for themselves to be a light to the nations (Isaiah 49:8) to draw people from idolatry to the worship of God. They envisioned their rebuilt Temple as a place of worship not only for Jews but for all people who turn to God (Isaiah 56:7). They pictured their city of Jerusalem as a city cared for by all nations (Isaiah 60:16) as the spiritual center of God’s dominion.

We are now living in a time of miracles. After centuries of wandering our people have returned to our ancient land and have built a strong and prosperous State of Israel. The prophets’ vision of our people restored in our own land is no longer just a dream. Yet their beautiful vision of our world at peace still seems impossibly distant. Jerusalem itself, though rebuilt by our people’s efforts and cherished by believers of three great faiths, is not yet a city of peace.

We do not have the insight to foresee the final resolution of the many complicated issues that confounded the last round of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. We can, however, pray with the words of the Psalmist that our prophet’s vision of a Jerusalem prosperous, secure, and at peace, will someday be realized.

Pray for the well-being of Jerusalem

may those who love you be at peace.

May there be well-being within your ramparts, peace in your palaces.

For the sake of my kin and friends,

I pray for your well-being;

for the sake of the house of the Lord our God,

I seek your good.

Psalm 122:6-9

BRING US BACK!

In our Bible, there are five short books called Meggilot, (literally “scrolls”). Over the course of the Jewish year, we have the opportunity to read and study each one: Esther on Purim, Ruth on Shavuot, Kohelet on Sukkot, and Shir HaShirim on Pesach. We recite the shortest and most challenging of them, Eicha (Lamentations) on Tisha B'Av, the day on which the Jewish people commemorate the tragic events of our people’s history.

Eicha consists of five psalms lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The tradition honors the Prophet Jeremiah with authorship. Our ancestors saw the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s visions of the troubles that would afflict Judah and Jerusalem if the people continued to reject God’s directives reflected in the sorrowful words of Eicha.

The Babylonians ravaged Jerusalem, burnt down the Beit HaMiqdash, our Holy Temple, and carried our people off into exile. Eicha expresses our ancestors’ sense of abandonment. How could they, feeling lost in a strange land, return to God, now that the physical expression of God’s presence, the Temple, had been destroyed? God, who once seemed so near, now appears very distant.

Eicha ends with a heart-rending plea, “Bring us back, Dear God, and we shall return. Renew our days as of old. . . .” To the psalmist, the once intimate relationship between God and Israel seemed broken and Israel lacked the power to fix it. The Jewish people cried out in despair. What hope could God offer to God’s chastised and repentant people?

The sages of the Talmud, centuries after the Babylonian exile and other devastating experiences including the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, suggest a response. Eicha Rabba, a collection of rabbinic homilies on Eicha, concludes with an imaginary conversation between God and Israel, the Jewish people. The dialogue opens with the final verses of Eicha, in which Israel requests that God reach out and bring them back to him

In response, God says that Israel needs to take the first step. Whatever, the Jewish people feel; from God’s perspective, the relationship can never be severed. God is always willing to connect with his people. All Israel needs to do, is to turn back to God as the prophet Malachi already declared, “Return unto Me, and I will return unto you, says the Lord of hosts” (Malachi 3:7).

This, however, still seems difficult for Israel. So Israel replies, “No, it is up to You, God. We have called upon You to bring us back as the Psalmist said, “Restore us, O God of our salvation” (Psalm 85:5).

At this point, the sage’s imaginary transcript ends but the conversation they envisioned continues. The dialogue between God and Israel poetically presents the Jewish people’s response to the great tragedies Tisha B'Av commemorates. Even though our Temple fell to our enemies and our ancestors were exiles from their homeland, the disaster did not sever the bonds, which connect us, the Jewish people, with our God. We may have experienced God’s presence in the Temple, but God spoke and continues to speak to us through the Torah, our “Tree of Life,” and our path towards salvation

The poetry of our Torah service reflects the insights of Eicha Rabba. We invoke God’s presence when we take out the Torah. We hear God’s voice when we read from the Torah. Yet, our spirits are not completely satisfied, so when we return the Torah to the Aron Kodesh, the Ark, we conclude with our ancestors’ plea, “Bring us back, Dear God, and we shall return . . . .”

Living in Galut, Exile, and in some ways, we are always living in Galut, living in a world not yet redeemed, is, to the sages of old, like being lost. We continue to ask God to lead us home. God continues to answer by telling us that we can find our own way by following his voice. We may want more help in our spiritual search, but God’s encouragement is all that we need.

This we know because even though we end the Torah service with the prayer to be restored, we bring it with the declaration that Torah, God’s summoning voice, streams forth from Jerusalem. Following that voice will get us back to Zion.

Lewis John Eron

“THE MOST MOVING STORY”

A number of years ago I was talking to a friend and colleague of mine who is a minister in one of the more conservative Protestant denominations. He wanted to share with me the power of the Christian story which is the Easter story, the story of God joining us, sharing our suffering, and sacrificing himself in atonement for our sins and rising again so that we can receive the gifts of forgiveness, salvation, and life eternal. “Could there be a more moving and important story?” he asked me rhetorically.

“For you as a Christian,” I answered, “there can be no better story. But that story is your story. Let me tell you another story, one of my stories, a Jewish story.” So I told him the story of Tisha B'Av. I told him the story of God who shares in the suffering of God’s people, the story of God who allows God’s own home to be destroyed and joins God's people in exile as they wander far from their homeland so that they never feel abandoned or ever feel alone. “Could there be a more moving and important story than this, the story of a god who is always with us, always guiding us, always strengthening us and always call us in our journey home.”

He answered me in silence. He had never heard this basic Jewish story before. He said, “Oh, I see,” and, at that moment, took a small step in understanding the deeper meaning of religious pluralism.

Every religious tradition recognizes that there is something wrong with the human condition. We are not where we should be spiritually and this is the root of our distress as individuals and as a human community.

The world of the spirit lies outside of the world that we can describe by words and numbers. We talk about this spiritual world poetically. We use metaphors, images, stories, and myths. We embrace it though art, music, and story. We enter it through the traditions and practices of our various faith traditions. Thus it is not surprising that different religions diagnose the problematic human condition differently and offer different paths to spiritual healing and wholeness. We also see that followers of these diverse paths to spiritual wellness have found meaning, peace, contentment, strength, and healing. To each and every one of them, their faith’s basic story is the most moving and important story because within the story is the diagnosis and treatment that has healed them.

Each religious tradition is unique and precious. Each offers a different perspective on our problematic spiritual condition. Of course, there are overlaps and parallels, but if we understand the fundamental viewpoint of each tradition, then we can learn to appreciate each one on its own terms.

We can capture a bit of the unique flavor of each tradition simply but incompletely. For Christianity, the basic human problem is “sin,” so that the solution is “forgiveness.” In Islam, the issue is “rebelliousness” and the remedy is “submission.” In Buddhism, the obstacle is “suffering” and the goal is “release.” To Hinduism the concern is “ignorance” and the resolution is “understanding.” For Chinese traditions, the question is “imbalance” and the answer is “harmony.”

Our Jewish tradition employs two metaphors. One is the story of Passover grounded in our Biblical heritage. In this story we describe the problematic human condition as “slavery” and the solution is “liberation.” The other is the story of Tisha B'Av as it is expounded in rabbinic literature and in our mystical teachings. In this account the human problem is “exile” and the solution is “restoration, return or coming home.”

Thus, the mythic story of Tisha B'Av based on the real suffering of our people that we commemorate on that holy day is one of the great stories of the Jewish people and of human religious expression. It is the story of the loss of our holy Temple, of our home, of Eden, and of innocence. It is the story of searching and wandering. It is the story of finding God is with us in even the most God-forsaken places. It is the story of finding our way home, ultimately to our spiritual home. It is the story of walking not alone, but with each and with of God, through this world to a better place for us and for all people. For us, as Jews, can there be a more moving and important story?”