Rabbi Novak's Sermons

Yom Kippur 5773 

Israel 5773 Rabbi David Novak Israel Congregation of Manchester,
Vermont Delivered Yom Kippur Morning, 10 Tishri 5773/26 September
2012.

There is a remarkable mural here at ICM. Commissioned for us by Alan
and Mindy Bloom and Steve and Phyllis Gottdiener in honor of their
fiftieth anniversary a few years ago. This mural visually represents the
centrality of who we are as a congregation with Israel in our name, and
the centrality of the modern State of Israel as critical to who we are as
Jews living in the 21st century.

In the middle of the mural is an oval. . .with two women lighting Shabbat
candles. One woman, on the right, is lighting in front of the green rolling
hills of Vermont--represents Israel Congregation. The other woman is
lighting in front of the Judean Hills outside of Jerusalem. Behind her are
representations of the Old City and the Y’min Moshe neighborhood and
windmill, familiar to many of us who have been in Jerusalem.

In our mural, these two women lighting the Shabbat candles represents
the centrality of how we, at Israel Congregation, think of the modern
Jewish state of Israel. We are connected in every possible way.
The uniting element is the green hills of Vermont transforming into the
brown Judean Hills outside of Jerusalem.

It visually represents how Shabbat first comes to the people of the State
of Israel each week and then several hours later to those of us here in
Vermont.

Israel is also represented in the Jewish holidays presented around this
image. Around the oval is a progression of the Jewish year through our
holidays. From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur represented by people
praying in ICM’s sanctuary, to Sukkot, Hanukkah, Purim and Passover.
Next is Yom ha’Atmau’t, Israel’s Independence Day.

Yom ha’Atmau’t is portrayed by a girl proudly and happily waving the flag
of Israel with its Star of David in the middle of two blue stripes, echoing
the tallitot that we are wearing today.

There are good reasons why so many of us are passionate for the modern
state of Israel, Medinat Yisrael.

To begin with, it is a miracle that the modern state was ever created in
the first place. That it was built on the ashes of a world that would not
aid the Jewish People before, during or after the Shoah, the Holocaust,
made it all the more profound that we have a place to call ours, no matter
what.

That Israel has grown in its short sixty-four years to be a strong Western
democracy amidst the enmity, hatred, vitriol and vileness evinced by the
Arab Spring that Yediot Ahranot columnist Nahum Barnea calls the “Arab
Winter” is also nothing short of miraculous.

That Israel is a democracy, albeit a fractious one, shows that people who
live in the Middle East can work out their differences through the ballot
box and the democratic process even though this is messy and often not
pretty.

That Israel fosters innovation in medicine, science, agriculture, energy,
defense, and high tech making Israel one of the world’s foremost places
to improve the lives of millions of people in Israel and abroad.
In short a small country under relentless security pressure thrives.

Still Israel is surrounded by dangerous neighbors, on its borders and in
the region, who are deeply destabilized themselves and remain great
threats to Israel’s existence.

Israel has Syria in the middle of a civil war between Sunni and Shia
Muslims where there are civilian victims too numerous to count.
Refugees pour over the Syrian border with Turkey. Iran is sending its best
military talent to prop up the Assad regime.

Israel has Egypt, which was a quiet border until the Arab Spring. Now,
the border is with a Sinai desert where lawlessness rules--as well as the
shared borders with Gaza, a Hamas-led, Moslem Brotherhood friendly
entity with 1.7 million people crammed into it.

Speaking of Hamas and Gaza, schoolchildren are regularly greeted by
missiles landing near them in Sderot. Missiles fired from Gaza now reach
far into Israel. Fortunately there is Operation Iron Dome, funded by
the United States of America, which is a missile interception system.
Iron Dome does a tremendous job at getting to the missiles before the
missiles get to Israelis.

There is no border with the West Bank, but there are numerous
Palestinians who live there, along with Israelis who have settled in the
area since Israel asserted control over the region in 1967. While some in
the West continue to argue for a two-state solution, it is clear that there
are already two Palestinian entities that disagree--and that the Arab
countries in the region have no interest in pursuing the Palestinian cause
if it does not serve their own domestic political needs. In other words,
the Arab countries are continuing to use the Palestinians as pawns.

On top of Israel’s multiple security issues is Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear
weapon. The President himself has said: “There is no light between the
United States and Israel with respect to Iran’s pursuit of developing a
nuclear weapon.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu is advocating what is known as the Begin
Doctrine, named after Menachem Begin’s successful taking out of a
nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. According to this doctrine, Israel will
always act in its best interests whether other countries agree.
Nobody here disagrees with the Prime Minister: Israel has to defend
herself against all enemies.

The United States is far from an enemy. Irrespective of the nature of the
relationship between our president and Israel’s prime minister, we can all
agree that the United States will always act in Israel’s best interests.

No advocacy organization is stronger in this belief than the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee which just last week released a statement
saying:

"With Israel and America facing unprecedented threats and challenges
in the Middle East, we deeply appreciate the close and unshakeable
partnership between the United States and Israel. President Obama
and the bipartisan, bicameral congressional leadership have deepened
America’s support for Israel in difficult times. Under the leadership
of Democrats and Republicans, working together, U.S.-Israel security
cooperation has reached unprecedented levels. We stand ready to work
together in the year ahead to enable both countries to meet the serious
challenges we face, especially preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear
capabilities."

This voicing of support by AIPAC should reassure all of us, no matter
our preferences for the upcoming election, that Israel’s security is a top
priority for our country’s government, as it always has been.
Still, Israel is right in the middle of a part of the world where danger lurks
around every corner. Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of the New York Jewish
Week, writes this week:
As the story goes, a visitor to the Biblical Zoo in Israel was amazed when
he approached the cage of the wolf and the lamb. There they were,
peacefully resting near each other, calling to mind the prophecy of Isaiah,
who imagined messianic times of peace. “How is it possible to have a wolf
and lamb live together?” the visitor asked the zookeeper.
“Simple,” the zookeeper said. “Every day a new lamb.”
Mr. Rosenblatt does a remarkable job in summing up the angst that
Israelis live under daily.

Each and every day Israelis go about their normal lives knowing that one
of the hostile nations and terrorist groups that regularly and publicly call
for Israel’s destruction can act. Rosenblatt writes that in the Mideast,
appearances of stability give way to predators and daily bloodshed.
Our hope and prayer is that not only will we and our children and
grandchildren be able to live in a world with a Jewish homeland, but that
the leaders of Israel and the United States do what is just and what is
right for a place that was born out of the destruction of World War 2 and
must exist to allow the Jewish people one place, no matter how small, no
matter how hostile the neighborhood, where
the Jewish people can thrive.



Kol Nidre 5773

Teshuvah: The Path to Self-Awareness
Rabbi David Novak

It is so easy to say the wrong thing.
It is so easy to take offense.
It is so easy to borrow something and never return it.
It is so easy to use vulgar language.
It is so easy to take advantage of people who are weaker than weare.
It is so easy to cause another person shame or humiliation.
It is so easy to cause suffering.
It is much too easy to do all of this without consciously thinking.
Because we are human.

Each year we come to Kol Nidre with the idea that we will “wipe
the slate clean” and make a new start, leaving all of these
behaviors behind us and come out on the other end renewed
revitalized and ready for what comes.

Then we do it again. What we said we would not do. What we
committed to not doing. We may even tell ourselves that we can
“put it away” until next year when we will take care of it on the
next Yom Kippur.

Truth be told, if this is you, you are not alone.
You, I, we are human.
This is how people are.

This is a quintessentially human thing to do.
What we humans have been gifted with, however, is that we can
think about what we do, and evaluate our own behaviors.

We are unique among all of creation that we can choose whether
or not we are going to do something.

It is this self-awareness that is the foundation and fuel for all that
we do here together and individually on this day of Yom Kippur.

What makes Yom Kippur stand out from among all of the days
that Jews gather is that it is our opportunity to step out of real
time as we experience it day to day.

On other days, we eat regular meals and attend to our body.
On Yom Kippur we refrain from eating to devote all of our
attention to the deeper parts of who we are.

On other days, the primary worship experience is in the morning.
On Yom Kippur we begin with this service, Kol Nidre, the only
evening service of the year where, to heighten our attention to
this liminal moment, that is, this boundary moment when we
wrap ourselves in a tallit to accentuate our feeling God’s presence
and embrace.

On other days we begin with Ma Tovu to reconsecrate our sacred space. 
On Yom Kippur we begin with the words and haunting melody of
Kol Nidre, the last words we utter before entering into Yom
Kippur. Here at ICM we begin with the quietude of the music of
Kol Nidre as it is played on viola and piano.

On other days we have three services: Maariv, the evening;
Shacharit, the morning; Mincha; the afternoon.
On Yom Kippur prayers continue throughout the day with not
three, not four, but five services, from Kol Nidre to Ne’ilah, with a
break to rest, but no real end to our praying until the shofar is
sounded once nightfall comes tomorrow.

Each and every element of Yom Kippur is meant to heighten our
awareness of our mortality and the impact our lives have on
others and on God. This leaves us with a challenge as humans and as Jews.
This is the challenge:

How do we extract from Yom Kippur every drop of spiritual
awareness it affords us, and hold onto that spiritual power all the
days of our lives?

How, on days when you rush from home to school or work, to
home to extra-curricular activities, can you carve out the time
and space for self-awareness?

How on days that pass by so quickly can you bring self-awareness
to the passage of time, the meaning of life, the meaning of your
life?

Achieving this level of awareness, infusing the everyday with this
level of meaning is difficult, but not impossible. Our Jewish
tradition gives us a toolbox of possibilities. No tool is more powerful than that of teshuvah, of turning. 

Teshuvah calls upon us to gaze deeply into a spiritual
mirror that reflects our true selves.

Teshuvah asks, no, requires us to turn away from our baser side
and turn toward what is good, and true, and kind in us.

Teshuvah, the ongoing act of repentance, is the chief task of the
High Holy Day season, beginning with Rosh Chodesh Elul,
reaching a pinnacle on Rosh Hashanah, and permeating Yom
Kippur.

Teshuvah at its root requires self-awareness.
It illuminates those parts of our selves that hide in darkness the
rest of the year.

Teshuvah is about accepting ourselves, that we are human and
that we are not God.
It is about being gentle with ourselves, because if you are not
gentle with yourself, how can others be gentle with you?

Teshuvah is about unburdening ourselves of the shame and
humiliation of what we have done so we can move forward with
our lives.

Teshuvah as self-awareness calls us to realize, and accept
responsibility for, the thousands of choices WE make day in and
day out--so we can choose more wisely, more carefully, more
thoughtfully.

Teshuvah as self-awareness helps us recognize that the world and
our lives are perpetually changing,. Our task is to acknowledge
that every day is an opportunity to consciously act with integrity
and compassion.

Ultimately, teshuvah is about healing the parts of us that are
broken. Intentionally or inadvertently we go through life and sustain
breaks, wounds, discouragement, despair, -- again and again. It
is the way life is. Teshuvah is about repairing that brokenness and re-establishing
wholeness. 

Teshuvah is about reconciling parts of our being that we prefer
not to acknowledge -- this is really the chomer, the substance of
who we are.

Teshuvah is about remembering that you are the only you that
has ever existed or will ever exist --and respecting your being as
the unique expression of the Divine that you are. Each one of us
is a miraculous creation.

Would that we could dispense with Yom Kippur and not need to
step out of time.
Would that self-awareness was easy to cultivate.
Would that our behaviors were all righteous, that our inclination
to act wrongly could gain no traction.
But alas, we are human.

Yom Kippur is our annual reminder that we need to heighten our
self-awareness to make teshuvah a daily spiritual discipline, not
a once-a-year event.

Let us recognize and accept with both joy and humility our
humanity.

In the coming year, it is quite likely that, at one time or another,
we will say the wrong thing, borrow without returning, use vulgar
language, take advantage of others, and cause humiliation or
suffering to another.

But if we can hold tight to the spiritual self-awareness of Yom
Kippur… if we can make teshuvah a daily spiritual tool… if we can
be gentle with, and forgiving of, ourselves… then the spiritual
power of Yom Kippur will guide us well and when we take a look
in the mirror at the end of the year, we will find a better version
of ourselves gazing back at us -- smiling.



Rosh Hashanah 5773 
Remember to Act
Rosh Hashanah 1 1 Tishri 5773/17 September 2012
Rabbi David Novak Israel Congregation of Manchester

One day a rabbi friend of mine was called upon to do a funeral.

Obviously when a funeral arises it disrupts other plans, and this day of all
days was one where her son, Jonah was going to present the results of
two years worth of his research at his high school. My rabbi friend badly
wanted to be there, but unfortunately the funeral took precedence.

Fortunately Jonah has a family member present, Danny, his older brother.

Danny had to leave work to be there, and knowing that his mother could
not come, made sure that he was there.

After Jonah’s presentation Danny texted his mother--which she received
while she was sitting in the hearse. “Jonah did a phenomenal job.”
In turn, she immediately texted Jonah saying “Danny said you did a
phenomenal job.”

Seven words. Nothing more.

She just conveyed the older brother’s words to the younger.

These seven words opened new doors for Danny and Jonah.
They always loved one another, and because Danny took a moment to
text his mother who wrote her own text to Jonah the two brothers now
started spending more time together, developing a deeper relationship.
All because one brother remembered and acted on what he saw, and his
mother remembered and acted on what she passed on.

The chain of remembering, in real time.

It is amazing the response one gets when one remembers another
person. A phone call to someone who has been ill. A visit to someone
who just gave birth. A card to say you are missed. Remembering is a
powerful way to touch someone, to create meaning. Often we remember.
But sometimes we remember and its too late to act.

Which is why our Torah reading today, chosen because Rosh Hashanah is
known as the “Day of Remembrance” is a powerful reminder for
remembering:

V’Adonai pakad et Sarah ka’asher amar v’ya-as YHVH l’sarah ca-asher
debear.1. “God remembered Sarah as God promised and God did for
Sarah what God had spoken.”

In Hebrew the word pakad signals God’s intervention in human affairs.
Here God reiterates the intention to make good on the promise to make
Abraham a “great nation.” Isaac is the long-in-coming fulfillment of
God’s promise.

Pakad--remember--is about taking action, doing, not just recalling to
mind. Remembering in our tradition is a call to action.

Torah describes the scene in which Sarah overhears the news of her
impending conception. Three strangers appear at their tent and she and
Abraham welcome them with generosity and gracious hospitality.
One of the visiting strangers asks Abraham, “Where is your wife Sarah?”
And he replied, “There, in the tent.”
Then one of the visiting strangers said, “I will return to you next year, and
your wife Sarah shall have a son!” 
Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent, which was behind where
this conversation took place.
Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years; Sarah had
stopped having the periods of women. And Sarah laughed to herself
saying, “Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment, with my
husband so old?”

1 Gen 21:1
2 Gen 18:9-10a

In the next sentence Torah has the Eternal saying to Abraham, “Why did
Sarah laugh, saying, ‘Shall I in truth bear a child, old as I am?’ Is anything
to wondrous for the Eternal? I will return to you at the same season next
year, and Sarah shall have a son.”

In response to this inquiry to her husband, Sarah lied saying, “I did not
laugh,” for she was frightened.
But God replied: “You did laugh.3”

Can you imagine what Sarah must of thought? Here she is 90 years old
and no longer fertile. Her husband is 100 and they no longer enjoy
intimacy.
Oh yes. God promised Abraham a son that he would become a great
nation, but now? Now? Seriously?!!
Yet a promise is a promise and a dream fulfilled is a miracle.

Pakad -- remembering-- is also pakad -- fulfillment.

Sarah’s life has been filled with sorrow and suffering. She left her family
and home. She was twice abducted by powerful men and pretended to
be Abraham’s sister to protect him, despite what might happen to her.
Unable to conceive, she gave her handmaid, Hagar, over to her husband
to produce a son--the son she could not have.
Pakad: God remembers and God fulfills.
Sarah conceives and gives birth to Isaac.
God did as God said.
God fulfills a promise to make Abraham a “great nation” in a miraculous
and marvelous way.
We are the spiritual descendants of Abraham and Sarah.

3 Gen. 10b-15

Our remembering is not just a thought process or an
esoteric idea in the pages of our Torah.
As Abraham and Sarah’s descendants and as mortal human beings, we
know the importance of remembering -- not just as a thought process--
but in taking action.
It’s deeply embedded in the pages of our lives,the pages we are writing
every day, with every breath, every moment.

Coming together in community, as we do today, creates meaning: we are
conscious of one another, what we mean to one another, what our
community means to each of us.
We humans are tremendously gifted in being able to remember AND the
ability to remember -- to do for others, with others.

Each of us has the power
to remember and to act,
to hope and to heal,
to be present and empathetic,
to support and to nurture,
to celebrate and to mourn,
to be with others no matter the circumstance.
This story we read of Pakad-- models for us the tremendous power
inherent in the remembering and acting by connecting.
In remembering, you demonstrate to other people that they matter: the
friend whose birthday is today -- or even yesterday;
the neighbor whose home repairs you dread, but at least you can keep
him company and try;

Each act of remembering will illicit thanks and convey that these
people mean a great deal to you,
that you are listening,
that you care,
that you want to be there for them just as you want them to be there foryou.

Often it’s little things: a call, a visit, a text or an email -- the human
capacity to touch another person is limitless and powerful. Remember
the story above? It was a text to a rabbi traveling to a cemetery that
created a string of connection between two brothers, creating an even
stronger and more flourishing relationship.

There are moments in all of our lives when we feel like anonymous
passengers on life’s journey. Active remembering -- creating
connections -- lets others know we value them.

It’s so easy and also so hard. Our lives are busy and full. But the value
active remembering is incalculable, more valuable than rubies and gold.

No matter how large or small the act of active remembering you should
know that through acting the recipient will never think your efforts are
too small, too late, or inadequate. They’re far greater and more meaningful than you probably realize.

Here at ICM, we have wonderful connections with one another.
Our community is built on connections, relationships.
We empower our community every time we actively remember one
another.

This coming year, let us use our power of remembering to reach out to one another.
Let us transform our thoughts into actions and touch others in a holy way,
a way that affirms their humanity.
In that way, perhaps more than any other, we create and infuse our
community with holiness, which is, after all, our sacred purpose.



Erev Rosh Hashanah 5773

It’s Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile
Rabbi David Novak

There was a time when driving an Oldsmobile was a
status symbol for success. Large and powerful to
drive an Olds meant you’d made it in America.
Then sales started to decline--dramatically. Faced
with a new generation who did not see Oldsmobile as
a symbol of anything except yesterday’s news,
General Motors feared that the brand was
experienced as old, stodgy, establishment. Would
younger people buy the cars their parents and
grandparents had driven? According to sales trends,
apparently not. In response to this well-founded fear
GM launched an ambitious ad campaign in the late
1980s with the now iconic line: “This is not your
father’s Oldsmobile.”
Remember that?


Perhaps you recall the commercials: William Shatner
(dressed as Captain Kirk) and his daughter Melanie;
Ringo Starr and his purple-haired daughter Lee; the
Judds -- mother and daughter. “This is not your
father’s Oldsmobile.”

General Motors correctly understood that times
change--and that they had a product on their hands
with an image problem--one that proved to be
insurmountable to the brand. 

No matter whether it was your father’s or
grandfather’s Oldsmobile, the campaign failed to
reinvigorate Oldsmobile in the GM family of cars and
trucks. After 35.2 million vehicles produced over 107 years,
GM shut Oldsmobile down. The name exists in
memory and online, with perhaps a few aging
Oldsmobiles still on the road.

What, you might be asking, does an advertising
campaign about Oldsmobile have to do with our
community this evening?

Unlike Oldsmobile, an auto with a great history that
was shut down after 107 years, the Jewish People,
with our great history over three millenia, thrives. We
thrive, in part, because we embrace all that has come
before us.

We thrive because we are part of a long tradition of
building on what has come before us to reinvent, in
each generation, what it means to be Jewish.
Unlike Oldsmobile which was perceived as being
unchangeable and thus unsaleable, the Jewish
people have always adapted and changed with the
times, sometimes radically. 

Much of this change came to us indigenously. Most
of it was forced on us by historical forces that forced
Judaism to reinvent itself.

We reinvent, but we don’t forget. 

At the core of Judaism will always be the Torah which we read year
in and year out, plumbing it for different meanings
even as we encounter the same words time and
again. These words, these stories, these people--so
important to our defining ourselves as our
heritage--speak multiple small “t” truths to us, some
of which only reveal themselves after multiple
encounters across the span of our lives.
Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim of Lunschitz1, 16th c Polish
author of Kli Yakar commented: "The Torah must be
new for each person every day as the day that it was
received from Mt. Sinai… For the words of Torah
shall be new to you, and not like old matters which
the heart detests. For, in truth, you are commanded
to derive new insights each and every day."

This may seem to you as a remarkable and radical
statement. In fact, Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim is saying
that Torah (indeed all of Jewish tradition) is meant to
be dynamic and changing, not fixed into one time,
one place, one meaning.

We are faced with our own realities, just as those
who came before us. We look to same texts to
derive sustenance as we mine new understandings.

This is why every generation creates its own, unique
expression of Judaism, as it must. It is certainly
what we are doing, right now, here at ICM. This is why
we can no longer speak about “Judaism” (if we ever could).

We speak about “Judaisms,” the many and varied
expressions of Torah. If the term “Judaisms” is new
to you, or strikes you as strange, please consider
this: After the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.,
the institution of the rabbinate arose in rapid
response to the void created by the crisis of the
sacrificial cult and the void in Jewish leadership. The
Rabbis scrambled to respond to a calamity of epic
proportion: How would the people serve God? How
would they retain and practice Torah (which was
largely about the sacrificial cult)? How would they
keep the community unified, and preserve their
identity?

Their response was a whole cloth reinvention of Judaism. 
To be more accurate, it was the invention of Judaism
on the foundation of biblical religion. It was radical.
It was outrageous. It was audacious. And today it
strikes most of us as ancient and traditional.
It is still what we practice.

The Rabbis of the Talmudic period opened for us
unprecedented opportunities to discover God outside
the Temple precinct: in our homes, our synagogues,
our work lives, our personal prayer and meditative
lives.

They opened the door for Jews to form communities
wherever they find themselves, and to form these
communities based on common need.
These rabbis of the Talmud also established for us a
foundation of commonality so we could all remain
connected as One People, however distant or
different we were, however distant or different we
are.

As those who walked before us did we will
continually renew, reshape, reinterpret and reinvent
Judaism to create meaning in our lives.
Our Judaisms are an inheritance of our tradition.
What we do to reinvent our Judaisms will be our
legacy to the future.

Unlike the failed Oldsmobile campaign we hope, we
pray that the Judaisms we live today, in this time and
place, will continue to root, to grow, and to inspire
as we drive the Jewish People forward.



Yom Kippur 5772 ISRAEL
Rabbi David Novak, Israel Congregation of Manchester
Delivered 10 Tishri 5772

God will say: Make a path, clear the way, remove the stumbling-block out of the way of My people (Isaiah 57:14).

The words of the prophet Isaiah reverberated in the beings of our people exiled to Babylonia. Isaiah’s words inspired hope in the hearts of Jews who longed to return to their ancestral land. Thanks to Cyrus, king of Persia, who conquered Babylonia, our people returned to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel). 

Isaiah’s words, Make a path, clear a way, remove the stumbling-block out of the way of My people, echo in our being today, in the 21st century, and today on Yom Kippur as read these words in our haftarah.

Nearly 2500 years after Cyrus permitted the Jews to return to their ancestral land, a modern-day miracle occurred. Out of the ashes of the Holocaust, the United Nations on November 29, 1947 voted to partition the British Mandate thereby creating two states. Two states for two peoples. Hope for the Jewish people was rekindled.

When the British pulled out early in May of 1948, David Ben Gurion declared -- proudly and joyously, the establishment of the new State of Israel. Speaking from Independence Hall in Tel Aviv he said:

WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948) the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called "Israel".

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.
WE APPEAL to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building-up of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the comity of nations.

WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

The flame of hope was rekindled.

No sooner had Israel declared her statehood, than Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon -- the Arab countries ringing the nascent Jewish State -- declared war. Israel lost 1% of her population in the War of Independence. (For point of comparison, 1% of our country is more than three million souls.)

In 1956, the new Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser closed the Suez Canal and declared war on Israel. This time France and Great Britain came to her rescue. 

In the 1967 Six Day War, Israel conquered land held by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, expanding Israel’s land holdings to include all of Jerusalem, the Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

On the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, in 1973, Israel was drawn into war yet again. The surprise attack by Egypt and Syria threatened to dismantle the victory of 1967. Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, said that he would gladly sacrifice one million soldiers to conquer Jerusalem. 

Five years later, in September 1978, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords on the lawn of the White House, setting in motion a cold peace between Israel and Egypt. No longer would Israel have to worry about attacks by Egypt on her southern border. The Sinai desert was returned to Egyptian sovereignty. Both Begin and Sadat won the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1981 Sadat was assassinated by his own bodyguards and Hosni Mubarak rose to power. 

In 1982 then General Ariel Sharon drove the PLO out of Lebanon following the assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London. During the First Lebanon War, known as Operation Peace for Galilee, Israel worked in partnership with Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel. The PLO was driven out of Lebanon to Tunisia. Gemayel was elected president in August and assassinated in September, leading to the mass retaliation and horrific killings of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Throughout Israel, questions were raised about Sharon’s motives and Israel’s role in the incursion into Lebanon. This was the first time that questions were raised about Israel’s intentions.

The Palestinians launched the First Intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In December 2000, Yasir Arafat walked away from Camp David, and the possibility of establishing peace with Israel, an offer that included much of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a large portion of Jerusalem for the proposed state’s new capital.

TheSecond Intifada launched in the early 2000s was marked by a sharp rise in terrorist attacks, especially homicide: Palestinians strapped bombs and shrapnel to themselves, and detonated them in public places: parks, restaurants, buses. Terrorists killed as many Israeli civilians as possible. Thirty Israelis alone were killed and 140 were injured just in the attack on the Park Hotel in Netanya on the first night of Pesach in 2002. 

This led, ultimately, to the erection of the Security Fence which has dramatically lowered the number of terrorists attacks and hence deaths, and curtailed the number of people entering Israel proper from the West Bank. Still our brothers and sisters living in Israel were a people rattled. 

On one foot, this is a nutshell history of Israel: born in war, living in war, and still at war, both politically and psychologically.

Yet this really isn’t a complete history. Since 1948, Israel has brought beleaguered, oppressed, and threatened Jews from Yemen, Iraq, Iran, the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Argentina, and most recently France, and settled them safely in Israel. One million survivors of the Shoah who had NO home to return to after the destruction of European Jewry found refuge in the new Jewish state. 

Out of the abyss of the Middle East has grown a great Western democracy whose technical and medical advances daily improve life around the globe. 

Since 1948, Israel has developed an unsurpassed educational and research network, pioneering thousands of technical, medical, agricultural, and engineering innovations that have appreciably improved the quality of life and the delivery of medical care around the world. 

In fact, since 1948, 10 Israelis have been awarded the Nobel Prize. Just this week Israeli Daniel Shechtman of the Technion Institute was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Shechtman discovered quasicrystals, used to produce one of the most durable types of steel, used to make (among other things) thin needles for performing delicate eye surgery.

Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Under the ever-watchful eye of a media that rarely reports the good about Israeli society, everything Israel does receives disproportionate attention, scrutiny, and criticism. It is all in the open for us to see. Compare that to Syria and the dictator who is currently killing his own people, out of the watchful eyes of the world media.

The State of Israel is, I am proud to say, a sovereign Jewish democracy in our ancestral homeland, a place of refuge that, should the whole world turn its backs on us again, as it did during the Shoah, would take us in, offer us sanctuary, and care for us. 

The result of Israel’s tumultuous history and media scrutiny is that within Israel as well as across America, Jews hold widely divergent opinions about Israel’s actions in the past, at this time, and what she should do in the future. 

There is a broad spectrum of opinions concerning the actions of the government of Israel, the role of the United States in brokering a peace with the Palestinians, and the efficacy of the Obama administration in catalyzing negotiations. The spectrum runs from Shalom Achshav, Peace Now, the New Israel Fund, and J-Street, to AIPAC and the Zionist Organization of America. 

At all points along the spectrum you find deeply committed and concerned Jews who love Israel and want what is best for her. 

Period.

And we’re not shy about expressing these opinions.

It’s not my purpose to evaluate any one point along the spectrum, or share my political preferences in a sermon where only I can express an opinion.

Instead, I want to share observations about where Israel is at this time, and what we as lovers of Israel, should do.

As American Jews who have chosen to live our lives here in the United States, what is our obligation to Medinat Yisrael, the state of Israel?

To my mind, we can no longer hope for “peace” as it is conventionally understood, a complete cessation of hostilities between nation-states. 

We can hope only for accommodation, that is, leave us alone and we will leave you alone. 

Abbas’ recent application to the United Nations will not suffice. Abbas’ application is a non-starter that the United States will veto in the Security Council. Certainly Abbas’ U.N. gambit is primarily for consumption back home, in his struggle for supremacy over Hamas. Nevertheless the level of support that the Palestinians are receiving at the United Nations, whether genuine or more likely politically motivated, should give us pause. 

Israel has no greater friend in the world than the United States of America. Not just because it is the politically correct thing to do--it is the morally correct thing to do. I still hope that Netanyahu and Abbas will reach an accommodation that will give the Palestinians their state and assure Israel secure borders.

Just recently, the President and Secretary of State reiterated their call for a NEGOTIATED two-state solution. Unfortunately, intransigence on both sides has brought any movement in this direction to a halt. In the war of words, Jerusalem’s eastern side is often called “Arab” East Jerusalem, even though there are Jewish neighborhoods there, such as French Hill, not to mention an entire campus of the Hebrew University, and southern Jerusalem’s neighborhood of Gilo, where new apartments are slated to be built, is a well-known and already developed part of Jerusalem.

In a speech before AIPAC this year, President Obama reiterated the commitment of the United States to Israel saying, “...the United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

Ironically, it was the Persian ruler Cyrus that allowed the Jews back to the land at the time of Isaiah. Today, another Persian ruler, Ahmed Ahmadinejad, denies the Holocaust and explicitly calls for Israel’s destruction. A recent form of high tech warfare, the Stuxnet computer worm destroyed roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms. It is believed to have been co-developed by the United States and Israel.

Most unfortunately for Israel domestically is its system of proportional representation in the Knesset. 

This system means that the larger political parties have to appease the small and extremist groups to assemble a governing coalition . This is why the current coalition, led by Likud’s Netanyahu, has to include members of Labor under Ehud Barak, as well as the hard right Yisrael Beiteinu led by Avigdor Lieberman, the Minister of Foreign Affairs; to know the foreign minister is to know a man for whom diplomacy is not his first priority. This coalition also includes Shas, an ultra-Orthodox right-wing Sephardic/Hareidi party, along with members of the New National Religious Party.

In short, for a country of seven and one-half million people, it takes much more than a village to govern. 

Israel’s domestic economy is robust, but so is its demographic situation -- on the Arab side. Twenty percent of Israel’s population within the Green Line is Arab -- and another four-and-one-half million Arabs live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For Israel to remain a Jewish democracy, that is, the majority in its own state, it has to find a resolution to the issue of the 4.5 million plus Arabs whose population is rapidly growing on land that it considers important to Israel’s security needs.

On the northern border, Hezbollah, a client of Iran and Syria, continues to make inroads into the Lebanese government. To the south, Hamas, an acknowledged terrorist organization, is governing Gaza. Since Israel voluntarily withdrew from Gaza in 2005, more than 4000 missiles have been fired from Gaza on southern Israeli cities. Operation Iron Dome, a brand-new anti-missile system that shoots down rockets while still in the air, was put into operation this year. Casualties and deaths from Gaza rocket fire are expected to decrease. Our government is providing another $205 million for Israel to develop batteries for Operation Iron Dome.

As American Jews, the State of Israel is a source of pride. It is a place where Hebrew is spoken in the street, where people live normal lives, consume Israeli media voraciously, and offer opinions often much stronger than anything you or I would offer. In the realm of generating opinions, Israel is a stellar success. Just listen to Israelis screaming at each other on talk radio, see the numerous newspapers that are consumed voraciously every day, and the high number of Israeli news and public affairs shows on television. 

Still, the propaganda machine churns out ridicule of Israel 24/7 in a global, media-drenched world. Here’s what we can and should do: It is our responsibility to love Israel, to visit Israel, to buy Israeli products, to embrace Israel, and to lobby for her continued well being as we hope and pray that one day soon Israel will take its rightful place as the safest place in the world for a Jew to live. 

Let us hope that the current generation of politicians will move beyond concern for the next election, and become statesmen -- people who think about the next generation.

My love for Israel endures beyond politics. It is part of who I am since my birth in 1962. 

I hope it is part of who you are. 

There is no amount of politics or propaganda that will ever shake my commitment to Israel. I will defend Israel to all who speak against her and I will argue passionately with those who love her about what is in her long-term best interests, as I, an American, understand them. 
 
Israel is young--only 63 years old. Yet the words of Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem does something beautiful: it combines our 2,000 year old longing with the reality of the reborn state:

As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,
With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,
Then our hope, the two-thousand year old hope
will not be lost.
To be a free people in our land.
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

And now please join stand and join me in singing the national anthem of Israel, Ha-Tikvah, The Hope:

עוד בלבב פנימה

יהודי הומיה

מזרח קדימה

לציון צופיה

לא אבדה תקותנו

בת שנות אלפים

עם חופשי בארצנו

ציון וירושלים
Kol od balevav p'nimahכלNefesh Yehudi homiyahנפשUlfa'atey mizrach kadimahולפאתיAyin l'tzion tzofiyahעיןOd lo avdah tikvatenuעודHatikvah bat shnot alpayimהתקוהL'hiyot am chofshi b'artzenuלהיותEretz Tzion v'Yerushalayimארץ

Kol Nidre 5772  
Rabbi David Novak, Israel Congregation of Manchester
10 Tishri 5772

We are profoundly human.

In so many ways we are hard wired and socially programed to be who we are, no matter how much we profess that we’d like to change.

Which makes the challenge of Yom Kippur such a high bar for so many of us for so many reasons. 

For it is much easier to default to our patterns of being than to change them.

Change is hard; if it was were easy, we wouldn’t be here. Because we wouldn’t need Yom Kippur.

In our hard wiring we are faced with thousands of decisions every day. 

Think about how many decisions you are making right now.

Whether to listen.

Whether to zone-out.

Whether to think about break fast tomorrow.

Whether you are feeling inspired.

Whether you are bored.

Whether you will watch television when you get home. 

Whether there’s a bill you need to pay.

Whether, whether, whether. . .
The mind churns.

The brain is profoundly complex and it’s not easy to wrest control of it not easily controlled. 

Would that our brains would come with an on/off switch. 

That would be too easy.

So is treating our lives as if we humans were drawing on that old toy, the Etch-a-Sketch.

You would write or draw on it, shake it and the screen would become clean of whatever you had done. 

With the Etch-a-Sketch, we wrote and drew on it and when we no longer wanted the image on the screen, we turned it over and shook it, and it completed disappeared.

Would that we could use Yom Kippur as an Etch-a-Sketch for our lives--that it would be that easy to create something, shake ourselves, and recreate. We could erase the old image we don’t like and draw a new one.

And even though the work of Yom Kippur is often presented to us as erasing the past to create a new future, the change that does comes is rarely a tidal wave. It’s more subtle. Like a pebble when it is thrown into a pond, creating gentle ripples. Change so subtle that it is ongoing, even if we do not know it is brewing.

All too often, within moments of leaving the synagogue we find ourselves doing what we promised moments ago to stop doing.

In other words, instead of Yom Kippur being an opportunity for change, it becomes a closed loop -- we think we’ve failed, that we’ve let ourselves down, we need Yom Kippur again. 

But that’s not what’s happening. 

Imagine for a moment another wonderful childhood toy: the slinky. Yes, we return to some of the behaviors we wanted to expunge from our repertoire, but we’re not in the same place. We’re more self-aware. We’re on a journey to a better version of ourselves. We’re spiraling upward.

How sad if the days after Yom Kippur become another opportunity to beat ourselves up and feel worse, rather than recognize that we are spiraling upward, that we are making incremental changes that will bring more change. If we recognize what is really happening, we will feel better rather than worse.

Let’s replace the image of a negative feedback loop with that of a Slinky, spiraling gently upward, sometimes returning to parts of ourselves that we don’t like.

Thanks to Yom Kippur, we are much more tuned in to change in ourselves. 

Yom Kippur catalyzes change.

Yom Kippur is working in us.

The spiral of life reminds us of life’s vitality and reminds us that change is difficult but not impossible if change is incremental, it happens a little at a time. No tidal waves, little ripples that build and build.

Presented with this, we have a palate from which to draw our decisions day in and day out, throughout the coming year and that palate needs to include the idea of teshuva, the idea of making a decision differently so we can add value to our lives, to our relationships, and to the world.

Change does come when we want change to happen.

It takes time.

It takes effort.

It takes a willingness to be mindful.

Yom Kippur is our annual check-in and tune-up on our journey through life. We can harness all the transformational power that is within Yom Kippur if we allow yourself ourselves to engage with the day in its entirety and its intensity.

Yom Kippur is time out from our lives. A vacation from our normal routines. We open up space in our bodies, minds, and souls - we open ourselves to possibilities. 

Possibilities of who we can become. Once on the other side of Yom Kippur, those possibilities remain with us, and each day the possibilities meet with opportunities. Change can be realized: slowly, incrementally, gradually, gently.

Profound spiritual experiences are the harvest waiting to be reaped.

So now is the time to shake the Etch-a-Sketch slate clean and consider what we will draw on it in the coming year. 

What will you draw? You don’t have to draw it all tomorrow. Today, tomorrow, next week… you have all year. You have your whole life.

The underlying message of Yom Kippur is that what we do and say really, really matters to the people in our lives. It matters to us. Therefore it matters to the world.

This is the moment. You have cleaned the slate. It’s blank. The people in your life have forgiven you. God has forgiven you. Hopefully you have forgiven yourself. It’s Slinky time. What and how will you use this opportunity that is now before you to create, to spiral upward?


Rosh Hashanah 5772 A COVENANT OF WHOLENESS

Ever since any of us first entered a synagogue for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we have been presented with an image of God somewhere 
UP THERE who is doing an awful lot of writing.

This is a main image for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: God writes our fates in the Book of Life.

This God is using an imaginary hand and writing instrument.

And in this Book of Life God writes our fates for the new year.

Even though we all recognize--or should recognize--that there is much more randomness in the world that would allow any fate that is written down to come to being.

We still hold on to this idea of God writing us down--which is what propels so many of us to the synagogue this time of year.

When we say “L’shanah Tovah Tikateivu”

We are saying: For the new year may you be written for good.

This assumes that God is choosing our fate, writing it down and that you, through your greeting, have the opportunity to alter that fate; 

When we pray “B’seifer chayim bracha v’shalom ufarnasa tovah n’zachar v’ncatave”--in the Book of Life write and remember us for blessings, peace, and a good living.

We imagine that God remembers and writes our fate for the days, weeks, and months to come--and again, we hope, we aspire that it is for good.

Nothing should be left to chance--life’s default. This is our aspiration for ALL of US. 

That knowing how life can be rocky and bumpy and completely predictable God will smooth our way going forward. 

And what most people have seared into their consciousness this time of year is this: 

“B’rosh hashana yikatayvoon u’v’yom kippur ychatamoon.” 

On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. 

“who shall live on and who shall die, whose death is timely and whose is not, who dies by fire, and who shall be drowned, who by the sword, and who by the beast, who by hunger and who by thirst, who by and earthquake , who by a plague, who shall be strangled, and who shall be stoned.”

This eleventh century liturgy has such a hold on us to this day that this is the one image that many of us hold.

In more recent times, the liturgy was set to music where we all sing:

“B’rosh hashana yikatayvoon u’v’yom kippur ychatamoon.” 

With the cantor chanting what follows.

The music makes it memorable.

The words make it frightening.

The concept of God--not one that I think that most of us hold. 

It does not leave us with any choice in our mind. 

Far be it, though, that this be the only image of God that we should hold at this sacred time in our lives.

We need other images: ones that affirm our humanity and our relationship, ones that are positive and recognize human dignity. 

The truth is God does not write or seal. 

And life follows its own terms.

So even though we ASPIRE that God writes and seals us for good, this is but one way that we express our aspirations, our hopes, that there will be a controlling force for good in our worlds.

Much of the time, we human beings have the ability to affect our own lives. And then there are times of randomness, chaos--that remind us how little control we actually have.

This is why it is vitally important that we have another metaphor for thinking about God this time of year. Not a God who sits, judges, and writes, but a God with whom we are in relationship. 

For the seven weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah, we are presented with a God who is in relationship with God’s people and we in turn with God.

These words, from Isaiah, portray not just a judgemental God writing and sealing our fates

But a God who is with us, in love, creating a covenant of wholeness, 

a brit shlomit.

In this brit shlomit, in this covenant of wholeness, we have quite powerful images of God.

A God of love.

A God who cares for us as a parent cares for a child or as spouses care for each other.

A God who populates an Eden-like environment, turning deserts into verdant landscapes.

A God to whom we can bring our broken parts to be embraced in wholeness. 

This is a God who reaffirms the covenant symbolized by the rainbow at the time of Noah: a God of creation and wholeness, not a God of destruction, not a God who predetermines each of our lives.

This is a palatable God, a relational God, a God to whom we take our brokenness, the places that we do not acknowledge to others but imagine that God knows.

In our imagination of God knowing, we find the space to overcome our feelings about our brokenness. This is a chance for repair, for healing, for turning, for change. This is a chance for being present in a relationship with God where understanding and compassion reign, not judgement. 

Indeed, we should all be written in the book of life.

Indeed, all of us should be the ones writing.

Indeed, all of us should find our way to affirm a relationship with God, a relationship of wholeness, a brit shlomit.


Erev Rosh Hashanah 5772 

The Sacredness of Jewish Time
Rabbi David Novak, Israel Congregation of Manchester
Delivered 1 Tishri 5772

Tonight we celebrate the new year.

Loud greetings, kisses and hugs, and handshakes – all expressions of our aspirations for a future that is good.

We are marking time.

And we are marking THAT
we made it through another year.

This is the joyous by-product of being Jewish: a calendar that allows us to have a new year beginning at a natural point in the lunar year

a time when 

summer’s warmth retreats

replaced with the briskness of autumn 

and the bright colors of autumn as only it can be in Vermont.

We mark time 

in our personal lives

in our marking of milestones like birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries

in how our health sustains us or challenges us or those we care about

in watching our children and grandchildren grow 

in how we respond to others when they need us.

Just as importantly, we mark the journey from one year to the next.

WE have MADE it.

WE are HERE. 

WE are ALIVE. 

And hopefully WE are WELL.

No small accomplishment.

We need days like the start of a new year to mark time because without this Jewish new year time would just float by leaving us looking back one day and asking ourselves: where did it all go?

Marking time reminds us that our own time is not endless.

Marking time in the context of Jewish community reminds us that it also has great meaning.

We use symbols: sweetness, from honey.

Round challot representing life’s continuity.

We enact liturgy that reminds us about LIFE, being alive, being remembered for life.

Zochreinu l’chayiim: Remember us for life, sovereign who wishes us to live, and write us in the Book of Life, for your sake, ever-living God.

B’sefer chayiim: In the Book of Life blessing, peace, and proper sustenance, may we be remembered and inscribed, we and all your people, the house of Israel, for a good life and for peace.

Mi chamocha av ha rachamim: Who can compare to you, source of all mercy, remembering all creatures mercifully, decreeing life!

U’ktuv l’chayiim tovim: And write down for a good life all the people of your covenant.

We are a life-intoxicated people.

Traveling these months from last Rosh Hashanah to this is life on life’s terms.

It means that we have confronted many challenges. 

It means we continue to confront challenges. 

Life does not become easier. 

Nor does it become less valuable.

It is a privilege to have life, to live life, to be in life, and to have this time to notice that.

The Rolling Stones may sing, “Time is on my side.” 

Yet we know that it is only through a combination of factors that we make it through. 

By taking time out for Rosh Hashanah we give each other the unique gift of coming together, renewing connections, and recognizing how quickly time passes.

WE are TOGETHER.

WE are GRATEFUL.

We are in LIFE.

Blessed are You, Sustainer, who has kept us in life, established us, and brought us to this moment.


Parashat Shoftim: The Blessing of Marriage 
Rabbi David Novak, Israel Congregation of Manchester
4 Elul 5771

The blessing of marriage is understood in the Jewish tradition by what the marriage holds for the future. Each time two people come together under thechupah the entire Jewish future is imagined anew.

We hope that the couple will build a bayit b’Yisrael, a new household among the People Israel that reflects all of the values we hold.

We hope that if the couple is blessed with children their children will know from a good Jewish education and carry on the values that were instilled in them to future generations.

In our children, we see the legacy we hope to leave behind, knowing that our name will be carried on. Without children, we know that our lives contributed to the betterment of the world by our being present in it. In each encounter with another face, we leave a bit of ourselves with that person. 

Year in and year a marriage is one where we aspire to have a good relationship, the kind of connection that builds on itself, making love stronger as the days, weeks, and years go by.

On the day of a wedding no one knows what life holds in store: not for tomorrow, or the next day, or any day, not the good, and not the bad.

We human beings are remarkable in that, having experienced the suffering when we lose someone we love, that does not dissuade us from still pursuing love and the human relationship.

Which is why at a wedding we celebrate creation, the enactment of the the creation that two people joining together bring to each other and to all of us. 

In modern weddings, when the bride circles the groom three times and the groom circles the bride three times, they are representing their inherent wholeness. When they circle each other once, the seventh time, they are signaling that the last act before they enter their chuppah could only be done together: a symbol that now two are becoming one, not one person, but an enduring relationship.

And when we sing “Siman tov v’mazel tov, yiyeh lanu” “good signs and good fortune--may it also be for us” we are asking that whatever the conditions that led to the good fortunes of this wedding that they should also be spread out to us as well. We all need all the mazel we can get.

In thinking about creation, our sages who crafted the sheva b’rachot, the seven wedding blessings relied heavily on the images from the Israelite prophets. They use metaphors found there for joy, for security, for building, for future generations. 

The seven represent the idea of a perfect number for a couple: again, the image of the completeness, the Shabbat, the seventh day.

The first blessing is one we all know, borei pri hagafen: the creator of the fruit of the vine. Right away the tone is set: there is a Creator and this wedding is one more manifestation of the Jewish idea of renewing creation daily. We actually imbibe this blessing by sipping from the one cup of wine.

The second blessing celebrates the diversity of creation, speaking of how God, the creator, joyfully revels in the very act of creation: 

You abound in Blessings, Adonai our God, You create all things for your glory. 

The third blessing of the seven reflects that among the diversity of creation each human being is unique. It reflects that each of us will bring our own personalities into the relationship as the spouses work to create their new reality together:

You abound in Blessings, Adonai our God, You create humanity.

The fourth blessing of the seven recognizes the Creator’s role in making a world with a place for each and every one of us, that in the diversity of creation each of us reflects the Creator. This is also about those famous words in the Torah that each of us is created in God’s image:

You abound in Blessings, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the World, who makes humankind in Your image, after Your likeness, and You prepared from us a perpetual relationship. You abound in Blessings, Adonai our God, You created humanity.

In the fifth blessing, we acknowledge that both the bride and the groom are children of their parents and children of the greater world of humanity. Here, the blessing uses a prophetic metaphor of a childless parent, God, being reunited with Her children:

May she who was barren rejoice when her children are united in her midst in joy. You abound in blessings, Source of Continuity, who makes Zion rejoice with her children.

in the sixth blessing, we praise the creator for creating the bride and groom, using our memories of the perfection of the Garden of Eden as the potential to be achieved in this marriage:

You make these beloved companions greatly rejoice even as You rejoiced in Your creation in the Garden of Eden as of old. You abound in blessings, Creator of Joy, who makes the bridegroom and bride rejoice.

Finally the seventh blessing is an elaborate formulation using prophetic quotations to celebrate the act of rejoicing:

You abound in blessings, Adonai our God, who created joy and gladness, bridegroom and bride, mirth and exultation, pleasure and delight, love, fellowship, peace and friendship. Soon may there be heard in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of joy and gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the jubilant voice of bridgrooms from the chuppas and of youths from their feasts of song. You Abound in blessings, Adonai our God, You make the bridegroom rejoice with the bride.

So tonight we are privileged to be with our beloved members, Bob and Micki Horowitz as we join with them in celebrating their fifty-five years together. We reflect back with them as we look forward, from this moment. 

Just as Bob and Micki have experienced a long married life together, may we all merit long lives and loving partners to carry us through our lives, the high points and the low, to know that love grows stronger, to celebrate what has been created and what is yet to be. 


Parashat Re’eh: To See Anew 
Rabbi David Novak, Israel Congregation of Manchester
27 Av 5771

Last Shabbat a beautiful six-month old boy was carried in to our sanctuary by his young parents, two people who had met in high school, gone to college, and married. 

Now Eli, their son, was part of the picture.

Of course this beautiful baby was captivating. All of us who saw him saw so many things.

New life.

A very cute baby.

Loving parents.

With fits perfectly with this week’s parasha in the Torah, Re’eh, or see.

For it is with our eyes that we let into our beings the senses of our world when we are newborn--and if we maintain the gift of eyesight throughout life, we see so much more.

For Eli, and other babies and infants who are pre-verbal, seeing is the first way to communicate with the world around him. Before they can express themselves with words, infants use their eyes to assess situations. If you notice next time you are around a new-born or infant you will see her looking at you--and will lock onto your gaze if you are willing to gaze into the child’s eyes. See if you can hold that gaze.

This is how infants communicate before words--they use their gaze to observe how the world around them gazes back, especially parents. 

Parents who are able to lock onto the gaze as long as the baby wants to hold it are actually helping their baby develop the brain functioning to have secure attachments. This is why if you see a baby and you hold his gaze for a while, even smiling and cooing, the baby will respond.

The brain is a truly amazing part of what makes us human. Instead of coming out of the womb fully formed, the brain continues to evolve in response to lived situations. For a child, this plasticity of brain function allows him or her to develop a sense of attachment to the primary caregivers, which in turn shapes how attachments will be formed later in life. The more nurturing, the easier it is to form attachments. 

Just this past week there was another article about how brain formation is affected based on whether a child experiences his or her parents as being depressed. 

The amygdala is a roughly almond-shaped mass of gray matter inside each hemisphere, involved with the experiencing of emotions. According to the article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists worked with ten year old children whose mothers had experienced depression throughout their lives and discovered that the children’s amygdala was enlarged. 

Scientists have established that the amygdala is involved in assigning emotional significance to information and events, and it contributes to the way we behave in response to potential risks. The need to learn about the safety or danger of new experiences may be greater in early life, when we know little about the world around us. Indeed, studies on other mammals, such as primates, show that the amygdala develops most rapidly shortly after birth. 

Brain development, then, is significantly shaped by life experience in these first ten years. 

For those of us who are further away from these early years what do we see when we see newborn life?

We see a life in potential and we see ours in the rear-view mirror. We don’t know what choices the baby’s parents will make or what choices he will make for himself but we are all pleased whenever a healthy child comes into the world for we glimpse into the child’s (imagined) future. We hope that this child will only know good: love, health, wisdom, caring, success.

And when we see a healthy newborn, we are given the opportunity to reflect on the great gift of life--the gift that we have received, the gift that continues to be given as generations follow generations. The world requires new life to continue its evolution ever forward. Even though we do not relish the idea that some day we will leave life, seeing a new life reminds us of our own finitude and to continue to embrace each moment that we are in life.

Tonight we are celebrating two birthdays, special days, for each of us has a birthday, and we celebrate them not to focus on our aging, but to focus on ourbeing. 

When each of us was created we brought into the world all of our potentials. 

When each of us was born we brought into the world someone who never existed before and will never again exist.

When each of us was born we came into consciousness of the exquisite privilege of being alive and what each of our individuality could bring to the world.

Just like we reveled in the newborn in our midst, we also revel in each and every human among us, remarking on the day when they came into the world, remembering what has been and hopeful for what is yet to be. 

And to our dear friends Ina and Marlene, happy birthday. Thank you for giving us this reminder what it means to celebrate the unique role of human creation and all that it portends. 


Rosh Hashanah 5771 Advance Health Care Directive: A Jewish (and Human) Necessity
-- Rabbi David Novak
Delivered on Rosh HaShanah morning, September 9, 2010/1 Tishri 5771.  Expanded from what was delivered.

 
None of expect to be incapacitated in such a way that we are unable to express the direction of our health care.
 
Yet it happens, more often than any of us would want.
 
Even though our High Holy Day liturgy has famous lines like “Who shall live and who shall die” ascribing the sum total of all of our fates to God’s hand, the fact remains that we human beings have the ability and the responsibility to articulate preferences by our own hand for those times when we are unable to express them.
 
This is done by creating an Advance Health Directive.
 
Last January I was in need of such a directive.  January 1, 2010 in the morning, fine.  By the middle of Friday night worship, not so good.  Saturday is lost to me, as is Sunday.
 
Apparently I was alert to make decisions on Monday and Tuesday but there is no memory of the entire week.  
 
I was not aware of what happened to me, or of my surroundings, until late Saturday night.  By Sunday I was competent to express what I desired.
 
Fortunately I had a health care advance directive that I created during my time in California that left my partner with knowledge of what to do and the legal power to make decisions on my behalf.  
 
This leads me to tonight’s sermon:  why it is a religious responsibility for every Jewish person to have an Advance Care Directive for health care.  
 
Why a religious responsibility?  Because we Jews are lovers of life.  
 
We respect and embrace medical care to preserve and extend life.  
 
We affirm p’kuach nefesh, the preservation of life as one of the highest Jewish values.  
 
Jewish people are required to take whatever steps are necessary to preserve life, even if it means violating other laws, such as those of Shabbat.   
 
And we affirm that while the liturgical trope of the Yamim Noraim, Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, is that God writes us in the “book of life for good,” there is much that we can do to articulate our own wishes. One way that each of us can assert p’kuach nefesh for our selves is by creating an Advance Directive. 
 
If we could look under the skin in our bodies we would experience an architecture both marvelous and artful.  It all works together.  Heart, brain, lungs, liver, glands, blood, oxygen, air, food, joints, our senses.  The human body is miraculous.  When it works well we are really unaware -- or unconscious -- of our underlying health.  After all, when you feel well, why even think about it?  
 
And then there are those times when our health becomes an ever-present issue.   Rabbi David Hartman once said, “You never really appreciate the prayer for health until one of those passageways is blocked!”
 
Rabbi Hartman is, of course, referring to the prayer that is said each morning:  
 
Blessed are you, THE ARCHITECT, our God, the sovereign of all worlds, who shaped the human being with wisdom, making for us all the openings and vessels of the body.  It is revealed and known before your Throne of Glory that if one of these passage-ways be open when it should be closed, or blocked up which it should be free, one could not stay alive or stand before you.  Blessed are you, MIRACULOUS, the wondrous healer of all flesh. 
 
Complementing that prayer is what we pray in Kol ha Neshamah that does not ask God for divine intervention in the illness, but rather that those in the medical establishment use all of their skill and knowledge to bring about healing to grant us a length of days.  There is no promise to God that our individual merit will be recognized in response to our request.  
 
This reflects, to my mind, a theology of creation that believes that all was created at the time of creation, to be discovered in its own time.  This is why the advanced medical technology that we benefit from today makes me glad to live in 2010 instead of 1910.  Human knowledge coupled with technology has advanced medicine dramatically in the last hundred years.  Can you imagine what it will be like one hundred years from now?
 
Yet with all of the advances come new profound challenges, especially around end of life care.  There are now machines that can keep us alive, often indefinitely, often without brain waves, often without our choice. 
 
Few of us will make the journey from birth to death without encountering the medical system in a serious way.  Which leads to this most important question:  if we don’t think about what we would like to happen when we cannot advocate for our selves, what would happen?
 
What would happen is that doctors would do whatever they could to preserve life.   This is the oath they have sworn to uphold.  Lacking a health care directive means you lack your voice in times when your voice cannot speak.  The lack of voice translates, perhaps, into decisions you would have never made for yourself. 
 
As a lover of life, as a Jew, as a human being, you cannot afford to lose your voice.  If you cannot speak for yourself, you absolutely must have an agent appointed, as well as a deputy agent, who can speak for you in times like this.  
 
Our desires must be respected because as Rabbi Elliot Dorff writes in Matters of Life and Death, "the fact that we can medically do something does not necessarily mean that we should.”
 
Rabbi Dorff, a renowned medical ethicist, continues:  “Whether we should do something depends, in part, on good medical information, but it depends at least as crucially on our own value system.” 
 
What needs to be done, he writes “requires us to relate this specific question to our broader concepts and values. Ultimately it is the patient who has the legal right and must take the moral responsibility to make the decision according to his or her own values.”
 
As a forceful advocate of the Advance Health Directive your silence does not dictate your care.   Your voice will be heard even when you cannot verbally articulate what you want.  
 
You will also prevent your family from making difficult decisions such as maintaining life support.  
 
As Rabbi Dorff sagely concludes:  “By filling out an advanced health care directive, a person saves near and dear ones from the moral responsibility of making such decisions and from the arguments that may otherwise occur.”
 
In other words, no matter how emotionally taxing these moments are, your voice is allowing your family the comfort in knowing that they are doing exactly what you wanted.  
 
We are blessed with many things in Vermont, including support for creating Advance Directives for health care.  The Vermont Ethics Network publishes a booklet, “Advance Directives Vermont:  Taking Steps:  Planning for Critical Health Care Decisions.”  
 
What is so magnificent about this little booklet is how encompassing it is in guiding our decision-making in the health care setting.  Let me assure you that I was gratified to have the strength to navigate many of these issues myself over the past several months -- but if I had been unable, a directive such as this would have been akin to my own speaking, through my agent.
 
Thinking about these issues when you are in good or relatively good health gives you and your loved ones an opportunity to prepare for the sort of medical crisis that can happen to anyone at any time.  If your health is already compromised, it is important that you create your Advance Directive right away:  the people who love you need to know what you want, and it needs to be in writing.
 
No matter how young or old you are, how healthy or sick, you need an Advance Health Directive.  At any time you could have an accident or unexpected illness and suddenly be unable to speak for yourself.  
 
First:  choose an agent and if possible, an alternate agent, people whom you trust to make potentially difficult decisions for you, who understands your beliefs and values, who is likely to be available, and who is wiling and able to speak up clearly and firmly in a crisis.  Your personal physician cannot be your agent.   It can be a family member, but make sure that the alternate is someone who is outside of your immediate nucleus. 
 
Second:  Talk to your agent.  Make sure he/she understands you and is willing to support your views.  If you have someone who does not agree with your views, you should choose someone else.  What is important is that your agent faithfully represents what you want, irrespective of their own personal opinion. 
 
Third:  talk w/others; ask your doctor for any medical information you need and find out if he/she supports the instructions you plan to give your agent.  Your doctor may be able to recommend more effective ways to state your instructions.  Consult with your rabbi if you have religious questions, especially with respect to organ donation.
 
Fourth:  Write your Advance Directive.
 
The key step in writing your Advance Directive is to name your agent.  Once you have done that and filled out the form properly the law requires that decisions about your care cannot be made without considering your wishes.
 
Fifth:  Sign and distribute the document.
 
Sixth:  Review your Advance Directive.
 
Remember that for many people revisiting the Advance Directive is an ongoing process. Changes in your health may change your views about your Advance Directive.  You should talk to your agent as well as your doctor about these things.
 
______________
 
That’s the nuts and bolts of creating the directive.  Behind it is the process of distinguishing what you do and do not want to have happen for you.
 
These are not easy questions, and they should not be easy, for you are considering situations that few of us want to ever consciously consider.  
 
What do you value most about your life?
 
Do you hold any religious or moral views about medicine or particular medical treatments?  
 
Jews who think of themselves as “traditional” believe that God, as the giver of life, is the only one who can take it - and thus write directives that instruct the medical team to do everything within their power to preserve life.
 
Liberal Jews assert more authority over their own bodies and health and are willing to consider decisions that may allow the end to come sooner.  No matter what your religious beliefs, you need to consider them in concert with your other concerns.   This is why some people find it a good idea to talk with their rabbi during this process. 
 
Most people have heard of difficult end-of-life situations involving family members or neighbors or people in the news.  Have you had any reactions to these situations?  
 
Should financial considerations influence decisions about your medical care?
 
What other beliefs or values do you hold that should be considered by those making medical care decisions for you if you become unable to speak for yourself?
 
You can see just from this recitation that there are many, many factors that go in to shaping an Advance Health Directive.  
 
Medical Situations and Treatment
 
Next consider possible treatment plans:
 
A. I would want all possible efforts to preserve life as long as possible.
B. I would want comfort care only and would not want medical treatment, including tube feeding, to prolong my life.
C. I would want comfort care and tube feeding, but would not want other types of medical treatment to prolong my life.
D. My agent should consider the possible benefits and burdens of disease-fighting treatments and consent only to treatment that he or she believes is in my best interests, as we have discussed them.  My agent may refuse any active treatment and then stop treatment if it is not beneficial. 
 
------------
 
Then review possible medical situations:
 
Suppose you are dying.  You are unconscious and death is expected soon, with or without treatment.  What treatment plan would you want?
 
Suppose you are permanently unconscious from an accident or severe illness. There is no reasonable hope of recovering awareness, but life support could keep your body alive for years.  (persistent vegetative state).  What treatment plan would you want?
 
Suppose you are in advanced loss of mental capability.  You cannot recognize or communicate with those close to you and can do almost nothing for yourself.  You could survive in this state for some time with medical treatment.  What treatment plan would you want?
 
Suppose you are frail, chronically ill, and uncomfortable, with a limited range of activities available to you. Then you become unconscious, at least, temporarily due to an acute illness. The illness is likely to be fatal unless vigorously treated in a hospital, but even intensive care offers only a small chance of recovery to your former condition.  It’s much more likely that you will end up worse off than before.  What treatment plan would you want?
 
Suppose you suffer a serious injury or illness.  You have less than a 5 percent chance of good recovery and if you will survive you will ever serious brain damage.  What treatment plan would you want?
 
____
 
Trust me that the above was not designed to depress you.  Nor was it reviewed to make you feel out of control of your own life.  This is about planning for life’s contingencies, the contingencies that all of us face at one time or another.  
 
If you love someone please make sure that there is an Advance Health Directive.  To help you in creating one I’ve acquired for us the little booklet from the Vermont Ethics Network.  Much of what I’ve spoken of is in this booklet.  While its suggestions may shape your thinking, you are ultimately in control of expressing your preferences and then choosing an agent that will uphold them for you, especially in a time of crisis that could involve decisions of life and death.
 
Our liturgy this time of year asks that we be written in the Book of Life for good.  While our prayers are directed to God above, the work of our hands and our heads can be directed to creating our Advance Health Directive.  
 
Who shall live and who shall die is not just a matter of our liturgy, it is a matter of our agency.  We should all enjoy good health in the new year along with the peace of mind that our health care directives are completed, making our voices heard even when we cannot speak. 
 


Erev Rosh Hashanah 5770 
I would love to introduce you to Mr. Mandel. When I was little, Morris Mandel walked large. Not tall in height, Mr. Mandel scraped the sky in stature even though he topped out at only five foot three inches.  
  
Avuncular, educated, opinionated, somewhat old world even after years in the United States, Morris Mandel was someone to notice. 
  
He was what we would call a presence. 
  
He also had some well-known traits among our community. 
  
For example, he would use the Manchester (NH) Union Leader to line his refrigerator--but would always cut out the across-the-front page headline that encouraged the readership to "Worship at the church of your choice" before using it.  That didn't bother him, but the two crosses did. 
  
He was a serious davener, too. 
  
He was part of the community that made-up Temple Israel in "the other Manchester" in New Hampshire. 
  
To be sure Mr. Mandel was there every Shabbos. 
  
And you could expect to see him at shul every day, for Mr. Mandel was a regular minyan goer. 
  
There he was with the others --and like almost all daily minyans back then they were mostly men and mostly of a certain vintage. 
  
Each person would come in, don tallis and tefillan (if it was morning), and take the same seat, day in and out.  The praying would begin.  
  
The davening done, the siddurim put away, there would always be a short time for socialization over a little piece cake, a cup coffee, maybe some nice herring.  
  
It was some good thing. 
  
Just as importantly each day they expected to see each other.  They would kibbitz.  Ask about each other's children.  Grouse about the latest health set-back.  Make plans to get together.  
  
Then it was off to the day until the next meeting at shul. 
  
Now if you were retelling this story you would think that it is a story about a man who went to the daily minyan in Manchester, New Hampshire.  You would be partially right.  
  
It is also something much more.  
  
It is about what sustains us--in addition to prayer. 
  
While daily prayer was ostensibly the purpose of the daily minyan, unstated and never far below the surface was this:  
  
Friendship.  Enduring friendship.  
  
Mr. Mandel lived to old age--and did so with his friends, the other individuals who he saw and engaged with on a daily basis for years and years.      
Gathering to pray was an opportunity to share their lives, not over the phone, but face to face.   
  
When one person did not show up--and had not let others know ahead of time--they worried and got in touch.  
  
As a youngster, I always thought it was the davening, the praying that kept these minyan goers alive.  
  
It certainly contributed to their longevity. 
  
It was not, however, the only factor in play. 
  
The connections they had with one another held them together in life.  These are not the connections of lovers or spouses, but of friends. 
  
That friendship has a role in sustaining people’s well being beyond the pleasures of friendship is only recently being explored more thoroughly by researchers.  
  
They are discovering that friendships keep people alive, sustain them, and affect their well-being in both overt and subtle ways. 
  
And what is our ICM community if not a community of caring, a community of friendships?  In our Manchester and environs one can quite regularly hear about the various degrees of friendships that are formed and expanded through connections made in and among our congregation. 
  
No matter what your beliefs are about religious matters, being part of a religious community is good for one's existence when it comes to creating friendships that matter. 
  
For it is in these friendships that the tools for sustaining life are found.  
  
Religion itself is based on creating connections. 
  
Rabbi Elliot Dorff writes that etymologically the word "religion" comes from the root word for linkages meaning "to tie or to bind" similar to root of the word "ligament".  
  
Ligament is part of the human body that ties together bones.  It allows us to remain cohesive within our bodies, holding firm and also allowing motion. 
  
Judaism as we practice it here at ICM is like ligament:  holding us together and allowing us to live our lives with friends.  Shared stories. Shared celebrations.  Shared comforting.   Shared experiences.   
  
For some time I have thought about the value of friendship.  It is just recently that those who study social organization have been able to conclude that friendship is more than meets the eyes. 
  
Reports the New York Times:  "In the quest for better health many people overlook a powerful weapon that could help them fight illness and depression, speed recovery, slow aging and prolong life: their friends." 
  
The story cites wide-ranging studies from around the world such as: 
  
·      A 10-year Australian study found that 22% of older adults with a large circle of friends were less likely to die during the study             period 
·      A Harvard study found that strong social ties promotes brain health 
·      A 2006 study of nurses with breast cancer found that those without close friends were four times as likely to die as those who did have close friends 
  
Complementing these studies are the experiences of friends who have known each other for 40 years and now live in eight different states.  These women are the subject of Jeffrey Zaslow's book "The Women from Ames."   
  
Through illnesses and deaths, marriages and divorces, and all that is entailed in living life these women have friendships that sustain them.  This book speaks to the truths that these friends feel about each other and a truth that we share:  we need our friends--and they need us.    
  
Most of us are familiar with what Judaism requires of us for taking care of the sick, for caring for people in need, for doing mitzvot that promote health and wellbeing. 
  
What does it tell us about maintaining life-affirming and potentially extending friendships? 
  
In the strongest possible ways our tradition lauds friends and friendships. 
  
We are instructed from the Mishnah, circa 200 CE to "Find yourself a friend."   It is a direct command to embrace another human being as a friend as we journey through life. 
  
The Babylonian Talmud tells us:  R. Joshua ben Levi said:  One who sees a friend after a lapse of thirty days should say "Blessed be YHVH who has kept us alive, preserved us, and brought us to this season."   (B. Ber 58b) 
  
Yes, the words of the shecheyanu are to be used when reuniting with a friend after a period of absence.  And what does the shecheyanu celebrate?  Sustenance and life. 
  
In the Book of Job it is written:  "One who entreats God's mercy for his fellow while he himself is in need of the same thing will be answered first, for it is said, ‘The Eternal changed the fortune of Job when he prayed for his friend’” (Job 42:10) 
  
Job, the book that deals with God's seeming capriciousness in dealing with the human creation, powerfully motivates God to act because of the caring Job exhibits for his friend. 
  
Given how Judaism honors and values friendship it should come as no surprise that God is considered our friend, called our “y’did nefesh”, our soul mate. 
  
This is a time and place for connecting with faces that we know. 
  
In seeing each other, we are reminded, as a prominent Jewish thinker posits, that we are responsible for one another just by virtue of seeing the face of the other. 
  
That is who we are. 
  
The name of our congregation is not "Temple" Israel.  We are Kehilat Israel, Israel Congregation. Our name is who we are, a place of meeting faces, of engaging friends.  
  
Taken to a higher (or more profound) level our relating holds within it the potential for friendships that aid in extending and enhancing life while also promoting wellness. 
  
The Times article concludes "Friendship is an undervalued resource.  The consistent message of these studies is that friends make your life better." 
  
We are at the time of year when our regular greetings, like Shabbat Shalom, are replaced with joyful "happy new years" or "L'shanah tovah!"  We want for our friends a year that is good, abundant in blessings, full of life and love.  
  
Our prayers are couched in the "Book of Life"--we pray that we are all written for good in the new year, that whatever may be in store for us, it is good.  
  
We should also add that we want to written in the book of life for friendship. 
  
Mr. Mandel's longevity may have been because of his genes. Or it may be that he had deep and abiding friendships. 
  
We are here as a community where we encounter our friends.  
  
To them and to you: 
  
A good year. 
  
A sweet new year. 
  
A year of blessings. 
  
And 
  
Most of all, a year of sustained friendships that in the words of the Shecheyanu:  keep us alive, preserve us, and bring us to this season. 
  


Kol Nidre 5770 
Suffering is the bane of the human experience.  

There is not a person alive who embraces suffering for suffering's sake.   

Fortunately, Judaism as I understand it, does not value suffering as a religious virtue.  Just the opposite.  Would that our values could alleviate human suffering. 

All of us who are privileged to experience life's wonders and awesomeness are also burdened, at one time or another, to experience suffering in all of its manifestations. 

The question of suffering is often  boiled down to one word:  

Why.  

Why do humans suffer.  

Why do we live with physical and psychic pain.  

Why do we encounter illnesses both curable and chronic. 

Why do we have to watch people we love suffer and feel unable to do anything about it. 

Why. 

It is not wrong to ask why.  Even though the answer is elusive, the pain of suffering causes such disruption that we are often left with our questions, if not answers. 

There is another question. 

Who. 

As in "who causes suffering."  

Did I do something that made this happen? 

Am I being punished? 

Did someone do this to me? 

There are more causes for suffering than we could count.  It makes finding an answer one of those who questions elusive or wishful thinking.   

And then there is God. 

The complexity of our relationships with God is no more visible than when we or someone we love is suffering.  

Like much of life's mysteries, our Judaism is a place where we go with unanswerable questions.  There are mysteries to life but it does not mean that when suffering occurs we are so willing to embrace them. 

This manifests in two ways:  blaming God or embracing God--or dare I say: doing both.   

How many of you have said or heard this question: 

Why is God doing this to me? 

It may be a question that reflects the person's true outlook that their suffering comes from God.  Or it might be a person grappling with the unknowing that comes from an illness or emotional pain and losing their language, unable to frame a cogent question about causality.  The pain drives them back to the most basic of words. 

Still the question is uttered--and it is not a new question.  Why God? 

This same profound question is recorded and preserved in our sacred texts.  You can hear the aching of our ancestors living with their pain and the estrangement it caused them to experience:  

Their suffering led them to feel abandoned.  


My God, I cry by day--You answer not; by night and have no respite.  


Their suffering led them to feel unheard.  


Why, O Lord, do you stand aloof heedless in times of trouble? 


Their suffering led them to feel punished: 

1        
Oh Eternal One: Do not punish me in anger, do not chastise me in fury. Have mercy on me, O God, for I languish; heal me, O God, for my bones shake with terror.  

Their suffering led them to feel rejected by God: 

Why, O Lord, do You reject me, do You hide Your face from me? 

Their suffering stole their voices: 

I cry aloud to God; I cry to God that He may give ear to me. In my time of distress I turn to the Eternal with my hand uplifted; my eyes flow all night without respite; I will not be comforted. I call God to mind, I moan, I complain, my spirit fails. 

Abandoned, unheard, persecuted, rejected, voiceless.  A broken relationship, completely.  

Their pain is our pain when we suffer.  Their feelings are known to us because we have experienced them in our own ways. 

The pain of suffering runs through the human experience as a thoroughly annihilating force and God does not ameleorite it.   

Our ancestors felt powerfully in their suffering.  God was culpable. 

The sages our tradition venerates from the Talmud wondered this as well.  Did suffering come from God? And if it did, what purpose could it possibly serve? 

A story speaks of a learned rabbi who suffered terribly with a terminal illness. This rabbi was pious, studied and taught Torah, and lived a life that was much revered by his colleagues and his students. Yet he was dying. Encountered by a colleague, another equally renown rabbi and scholar, he was asked if the suffering and the reward was worth it.  

The suffering rabbi replied: neither the suffering nor the reward.  

We understand he was suffering--he had a terminal illness.  What reward was he speaking of?  


In those days the only plausible answer to the pain of suffering was that God had some reward for the sufferer in the world to come because there could be nothing in this world to compensate for suffering's intensity.    

Coupled with that, the sufferer was believed to have done something in this world that caught God's attention and the suffering was sent by God as an "affliction of God's love".  

Suffering as an affliction of love? What kind of love is that?  

This is a love that was believed to be one that demonstrated God's caring and closeness to the individual by causing him or her to suffer.  


What is so stunning about this story is that the learned rabbis thoroughly reject the notion that human suffering is an act of God's love or an indication of a reward in some future world. 

Then, as now, suffering is not understood as a reward or a punishment, and if it was thought to derive directly from God, it was rejected.  

For those of us here tonight who are suffering in any way know please that your suffering is not a gift or a reward from God.   It is not in suffering that I wish to encounter God. It is not in suffering that I wish you to encounter God.  

The voices of the Psalms and the voices of the rabbis blend with ours today over the generations. We ask the same questions, often of God.  

There is another side of the story of our Talmudic rabbis and those who came before and after them who assigning blame to God for suffering. 

When God is blamed as the cause we are, knowingly or unknowingly, also driving God out of any other possibility. 

We are driving away God can be a comfort to us.  

We are driving away God that can make us feel less alone. 

We are driving away God that can offer some measure of comfort amidst our incessant pain. 

When we encounter God when we suffer we have within us the opportunity to encounter God with the whole range of what we are feeling, the good, the terrible, the blame, the comfort.  God is not one-size-fits all for the blame.  God can handle whatever you have to experience. 

Just don't push God away.   

Invite God into our struggles with suffering.   In the Torah it says that we human beings are created in God's image, as a reflection of God.  If that is so then it is fair to say by logical inference that if those created in God's image are suffering then God suffers with us.   

We are not alone. 


God can handle your anger.  


God can handle your blame. 


God can handle your resignation. 


God can handle your not knowing or understanding. 


What God cannot handle is your absenting yourself from God. 


God needs humans. 


When we suffer, we need God to be there for us in whatever way we understand God.  

Over these 24 hours of Yom Kippur we will pray to this God to be merciful and compassionate, that mercy and compassion overwhelm any desire to judge us in any way that is damaging to us. 

Adonai, Adonai, a God full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in mercy and truth; keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving inquity, transgression and sin; and acquitting. 

In simple terms: we ask God to be there for us. 

After spending considerable time seeking forgiveness, we put forward a request toward the end of the Yom Kippur Amidah that I hold close to me throughout the year: 

Our Parent, Our Sovereign, remember Your mercy and suppress Your anger, and remove pestilence, sword and famine, destruction, captivity, iniquity and plague, all evil occurrences, and every disease, stumbling-block and contention, every kind of punishment, every evil decree and all causeless enmity, from us and from all the children of Your covenant. 

Whatever power God does have--keep us from suffering.  

Reduce our suffering. 

Know that we are not alone in our suffering. 

This, too, is expressed in the words of our ancestors in the Psalms: 


Ps 30 3: O Lord my God, I cried out to You and You healed me. 


Ps 71-21: You will turn and comfort me. 

And in Psalm 90, a phrase that succinctly notes that we are given ample suffering--give us joy in equal amounts: 

Ps 90-15: Give us joy for as long as You have afflicted us, for the years we have suffered misfortune. 


Finally, a benediction, from Psalm 20, words that resonate today as the day they were first put on the page: 


May God answer you in time of trouble, the name of Jacob's God keep you safe. 


May the Eternal send you help from the sanctuary and sustain you from Zion. 


May the Eternal grant you your desire and fulfill your every plan. 


May we shout for joy in your victory, arrayed by standards in the name of our God. 
May the Eternal fulfill your every wish.  


Erev Rosh Hashanah 5769 The Stakes
- Rabbi David Novak

May you be written for good.
 
L'Shana tovah tikateivu:  That is our wonderful Jewish greeting where we share with each other our aspirations for a year that is happy, to be sure--- and also for a year that is infused with meaning  and saturated with blessings.

It is also an aspiration that the world that continues on its natural course might be shaped in ways large and small by what actions we consciously choose to take.

Tikkun Olam is perhaps Judaism's best-known religious precept.  This is the concept of repairing the world.  Both the world--and the repairs it always needs--are large, much larger than any one human being or group of human beings can comprehend.

Which is why Tikkun Olam is not given to us as Jews as an option.  We do not get a choice as to whether or not to participate in the repair of the world:  

Tikkun Olam is an ethos, an all-encompassing mandate derived from our religious value to create a world worthy of God and our place in it.  The idea is in every worship service, in the Aleinu, where we pray that we will create a "taken olam l'malchut shaddai:  to repair the world for God's sovereignty."  

Our religious values do not let remain acceptable what is.  

Our religious values always promote what can be, what should be.

Which is why I am asking you tonight as we begin 5769 to consider the choices you will be making this fall to be of the highest importance, as a citizen of the United States, and as a Jew mandated to repair the world during your time on and in it.  I am not in the habit of making expressly political sermons and do not intend to begin now.

I do intend to frame for all of us the nature of the decisions that are before us through the frame of our Jewish experience.

As we enter 5769 the stakes could not be higher.

This is a year when the economy matters.

Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by nearly nine percent and the S & P 500 did the same. The Dow dropped 777 points.  It was the worst single day drop in the Dow in two decades.  This reflects the extreme volatility in what was the greatest economic system in the world.  The United States, the lynchpin of the world economy, is hurting, badly.  The pain extends throughout all sectors of society.  It is hurting the banking and investment system, to be sure.  The risks that have been taken on Wall Street for easy money based on sub-prime mortgages have run their course.  Like the S & L crisis it is the government that is being called upon to rescue the system.  

Yet these grotesque economic risks also hurt the poor, the weak, the vulnerable, those who had the least to begin with and who will have even less now.  We must not lose sight of the voiceless, the most vulnerable in our societies, who must be fed, clothed, housed, and cared for in what remains one of the richest countries in the world.  To get out of this mess will require pain across the board.  We must remain vigilant to ensure that pain is not disproportionate to those who are already hurting.  

This is a year when health care matters.

There are millions of uninsured or underinsured Americans who can ill afford the cost of health insurance that would cover them. Nearly 47 million Americans, or 16 percent of the population, were without health insurance in 2005, the latest government data available. Even more scandalous is how this affects our children. Nine million children in this country are uninsured. In a country as wealthy as the United States, with the best medical facilities in the world, there are people who cannot get the treatment they need and must make choices of whether or not to get health care based on financial considerations. It costs much less to be treated by a physician than in an emergency room. Health care should be something that all have, not a privilege.   People will still get sick during this economic tumult; we cannot let them down. 

This is a year when the environment matters.

The recent spike in oil prices reminds all of us that oil is a finite resource, and that perhaps, just perhaps, we in the United States have been consuming much more than our fair share. In the United States we consume 20,680,000 barrels of oil a day, more than twenty-five percent of the world's consumption.  It should alarm, if not frighten you, that a full fifty-eight percent of the oil we use is imported, much of it from countries that fund terrorism.

Investments in the future will mean investing in renewable and sustainable technologies, not only for our energy needs, but to lead the world in creating new technologies.  We need to consume less and remember that it is the actions of each one of us that can lead to the incremental change necessary for the sustainability of the environment. 

This is a year when the Middle East matters.

Israel had her sixtieth birthday this year while her newest nemesis, Iran, through its bellicose and amoral president, announces that it has missles, perhaps someday with nuclear weapons, that can reach Tel Aviv. Just last week he spoke at the world platform of the United Nation repeating his bellicose lies. In June he was quoted saying "I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene.”

Israel's very survival is no longer just threatened by the radical Palestinians of Hamas in Gaza, or the radical Shia of Hezbollah in Lebanon.  

Israel is in a bad neighborhood with no shortage of enemies who rejoice when innocents are maimed and killed in terrorist attacks.   Yet she still wants and seeks peace.  A new government is being formed, both in the United States and in Israel.

Israel relies on her friendship with the United States; we, too must do what we can to remain in relationship with our brothers and sisters in Israel.

This is a year when the federal judiciary and especially the Supreme Court matters.

They are appointed for life and their appointments live far beyond the person who appoints them.  Our oldest justice will be 88.  Social issues are frequently contested in the courts. . .with long lasting impact.  

This is a year when federal regulation matters.

The implosion on Wall Street, environmental degradation, weakened consumer protections that have led to injuries--all of these demonstrate that government has a role to play to ensure that fair and competitive markets do not mean free-for-alls or products that can damage or even kill human beings. 

This is a year when civil rights matter.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Executive Branch and the Congress have both taken steps that allow unprecedented domestic wiretapping and spying on Americans in America.  Will we, as Americans, allow terrorism and its aftermath to continue to infringe on our civil rights?

This is a year when infrastructure matters.

Our airports are clogged.  Our railways dangerously out of date.  Many of our highways and bridges suffer from years of deferred maintenance. All of it requires attention. This is the United States:  should this be a country where bridges on interstate highways in major cities collapse?

This is a year when YOU matter.

One cannot read the news, day in and day out, and wonder if this world is spiraling so fast that its course cannot be changed.

The answer is:  no matter how fast it spirals, you do not have the luxury to sit back on your hands.  Our sages teach that it is not your job to finish the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.  No matter how daunting these problems are, no matter how small we may see ourselves in the scope of the world, we are given the greatest gift of all, our lives. 

We are given time on this planet.

We are given insights and abilities.

We are commanded to act as God's partners in the ongoing work of repairing the world.  

To do anything less would be to accept the status quo.

And it is unacceptable. 

It is 5769.  A new year.  A turning point.  Time is moving in one direction: forward - with our entire beings.

As we reflect on the gift of time, so, too, may we reflect on how we can use our very beings on behalf of the world that sustains us.

L'shanah tovah tikateivu.  May we all be written for good in the new year and may we all use our minds, our hearts, and our agency to do our part in creating a world that matters, l'taken olam l'malchut shaddai, to repair the world to make it worthy of God's creation and our presence on it. 



Thinking about God 
Where and what is God and is there a place for God in my life?

Not a question that I get too often, nor would I say that it is foremost on most people's minds.  This should not surprise any of us--this is a complex question:  Where and what is God and is there a place for God in my life?

And yet in its complexity and in the struggle that it entails, there is reward. For how we think about and experience the Divine has the potential to color our whole experience of being. So on this holy Shabbat evening, on the longest day of the year, when we cross the summer solstice, I hope that, just as there is an expansion of light in our lives, I can invite you to open up yourself to the light that is the process of knowing God.

There is no one right answer to doing this Jewishly; in fact, there are many answers.   We know God through doing mitzvot, sacred obligations that are incumbent upon us as Jews.  We know God through prayer.  We know God through study.  We know God through how we treat other people. Yet even as I say we "know" God, God is difficult, if not impossible to know.  After all, God is, well, God.

Part of what makes God different than concepts that we can grasp with our intellect is that knowing God operates in the world of metaphor---we only have language as humans to describe what we know and experience. 

We use words to describe how we feel--I feel close, I feel far, I feel hot, I feel cold.  We use metaphors to describe God--God is called many names in our Tradition. We use poetic language, such as what is used in the Kabbalah to describe the inner workings of God. And we use relational language--"Dear God, help me figure out this problem.  Be there for me as I try to be there for you." Because we are using language to approximate knowing the unknowable, we live in the land of imprecise. That makes it hard to know God. 

So let me offer some guiding questions for you to contemplate as a place to begin or renew your journey to knowing God.  There are no right answers, but they are to help all of us move to a place of greater depth in our thinking about God.

When you pray, who or what do you imagine that you are speaking to or with?  Do you experience that God listens to you only when your pray in the synagogue--or do you call on God at other places? How do you imagine God's power?  As a deity that is involved in people's individuals daily lives, that is immanent,  or as a transcendent being that is more abstractly part of the universe, a great other?

Do you think about God as an other that you relate to, as in a covenantal relationship, or do you experience God in more of a unitive manner, that is, as part of you and the world around you. When you are facing a difficult situation, do you imagine God playing a comforting role?  Do you experience God as being absent. Or are you angry at God because you believe that God allowed something bad to happen.  Have you ever expressed anger at God?  Do you think God can handle your anger? How do you grapple with the evil in the world.  Should God have prevented it from happening?  What if God is behind it?  Can you accept that?  Can the blame be shared?

How do you experience God making God's presence known in the world today?  Do you relate to God's revelation at Mt. Sinai as a one-time affair or something that is renewed daily that you experience?

Now I hope you're thinking: these are not easy questions to contemplate.  You are absolutely correct--they are not.  But in the struggle to truly know God requires our taken our entire selves--our minds with all of their questions and our mortal bodies. . .as we journey through life. . .to struggle for answers, answers that work for us, or perhaps, never truly finding the answers, the engagement is answer enough.



Happy Birthday March 21, 2008

Once a  year we get to celebrate "our special day."

Happy birthday!

It's become quite an industry this birthday business.

Take a look at the amount of space Northshire Bookstore devotes to the birthday card category alone:  simple ones, funny ones, ones that make fun of age, ones that give an opportunity to convey a meaningful message: just try to pick the correct one! Well tonight, I think that Sasha and Marlene have found a wonderful way to celebrate the birthday of their husbands, our beloved Arnie and David, by convening community on Shabbat.  This is no ordinary birthday party--our entire community is invited, and we begin by bringing in Shabbat together before we gather around the table. 

***
Birthdays are not celebrated ambivalently--most people either embrace their birthday 110% or wish that it would just come and go with no reminders.  I'm of the school that remembering birthdays is a good thing.  Not only is it a good thing, it is, to my mind, one of our most important annual reminders that is uniquely personal of the miracle of our being, the miracle of creation, the potential that each of us has and the opportunities we are given to do something with this gift of life.

***

From Two Cells to You

In the beginning you were a fertilized egg.  Biology ruled who you were.  You were a genetic masterpiece, in utero.  Your growth was genetically programmed, and your biological mother provided you with the nutrition and blood that you needed to grow for those nine months. 

And then in one moment you and your birthday were created simultaneously.  What was to that point another day became the day when unique you entered the world.

With one gentle swat on the tush, your lungs are opened and the lifeforce, the air, joins with the circulating blood, flesh and bones, and life begins.   

I would suggest that most of us do not remember our births the way our birth mothers do!  For even though we are ready to be born, what has developed in the womb begins the journey of reaching potential only once born.  That journey includes both our physical growth and our growth in cognition.  Babies, as most of you know, when they are pre-verbal communicate with their eyes.  When you stare back into a baby's eyes, the baby is making a decision about the level of connection the two of you have established.

Language comes soon thereafter, as the baby develops and begins the transformation into a toddler.

Years of playgroups, school, high school, college--all devoted to that majestic instrument, the human brain.

For as we come into life and consciousness, we lack the immediate cognition that allows us the awareness of those early moments of life.  We grow in consciousness and cognition and gradually begin to understand, observe and relate to the world around us.

Yet what is not obvious to us when we are born is easy to forget as we age.

So here's where being Jewish comes in: Our Jewishness catalyzes us to remember to be conscious of the gift of creation, ours, the worlds.

In Judaism we celebrate creation over and over again.  We affirm that creation is not a one-time affair, happening only as related in the beginning of Genesis with the two Eden stories--in fact, creation plays a role in most Jewish services. 

On Shabbat morning we call the Creator:  the "bringer of light, with tender care, upon the earth and its inhabitants, in goodness you renew each day perpetually Creation's wondrous work.  Blessed are  you Eternal One, the shaper of heavens' lights."

This idea of creation being every present and ever renewing should inspire each and every one of us.  The day of our birth is a day of creation.  Each day, when we rise to the gift of a new day renewed, we should express gratitude.  Our prayers also reflect that:  we make the prayer for health followed by the prayer for breath.

We are awake.  We are alive.

This reawakening belongs to all of us each and every day.  On our birthdays, however, we can and should take time to be reflective on what has come before and what still remains to come.

We should celebrate your creation.

Let us recommit to the idea that birthdays are reflections of the miraculous, the creation of new life and potential.

Let us recommit to age being a signifier of experience, of growth, of wisdom---dare I say it a fine vintage that improves with age?

Let us recommit to birthdays being a chance to remember the value we place on the people we call family and friend and colleague  and use that day to tell people how highly we value them.

Let us make this and every birthday a time of truly achieving happiness.



Shabbat Zachor March 14, 2008

We allow ourselves to get easily distracted by salacious stories.

This week is a prime example--and I admit that I was caught up in it, too when I read the news that the soon to be former governor of New York entangled himself with an expensive  series of encounters with prostitutes.  There are many reasons why this story caught our attention:  the perpetrator is larger than life, an activist who went after prostitution rings in his former job as  New York's attorney general, and a pol who seemingly did not mind to anger people, including people who would ostensibly be on the same side as he was.

For a moment the story had enough glare to eclipse the ongoing tales about Hillary and Obama and speculation about which one would come out on top. 

Fortunately, whatever you think of the governor and what he did, he resigned, allowing it to become a personal and private failure and the business of New York State can now proceed. 
Yet the stories about the campaign and the governor disturb me for a different reason.  For it was this past week that the United States lost more American soldiers in combat in Iraq, bringing the total to 14 for the month.  

In the glare of Spitzer and the campaign, and now the economic problems, these losses barely registered. 

I am not here tonight to give a talk about whether we should or should not be in Iraq or what a strategy might be for changing the status quo. 

I am here to suggest that we remember that, whatever our personal opinion on the war may be, that three thousand, nine hundred and eighty-seven American soldiers have died in Iraq. 

Nearly thirty-thousand Americans have been wounded.  Many of them are back in the United States, their lives permanently altered by their injuries. 

A war that began in 2003 and continues on in 2008 is not hard breaking news.  We have become, many of us, inured to the reality of war.  The death and injury, the cost, the extended deployment times that rent asunder families.  And not only our countrymen and women: the people of Iraq, too. For while the butcher of Bagdad and many of his minyans are dead, so too, are nearly 90,000 civilians to the war and to internecine Islamic violence. 

There is not one of us who does not feel for our dead and injured soldiers and their families. 

But what we do need is a memory. 

This is the Shabbat before Purim, where we remember the story, as retold in the Book of Esther, of a devastating plot against the Jews.  It is one of four special Shabbatot before Pesach.  It is known as Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of memory.  On this Shabbat, we take out an extra Torah scroll and read the story of Amalek, the sworn enemy of the Jewish people in the Torah.  We read: 

17 Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt — 18 how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. 19 Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget! 

We are told to blot out Amalek's memory and yet not forget what he did. 

In this recounting of Amalek that we do this Shabbat, there is an analogue for our modern condition where we allow ourselves to forget what is too unbearable to remember. For the Amalek story innocent children and women and stragglers were attacked, the low hanging fruit if you will.  It was a humiliating and embarrassing event and it was a defeat at the hands of humans on a journey instigated by God. 

We have had many enemies, but one of the main enemies that Shabbat Zachor cautions us against is the enemy of willful forgetting:  blotting out information that is too difficult to process. 

In our modern times, one of the way we do this is by letting ourselves get diverted to stories like Eliot Spitzer, like who said what about whom in the presidential race. 

And we can have a week go by like this one that is elapsing now where we have lost more of our beloved countrymen.  

We owe it to them and their families, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our country, and we owe it to our shared humanity to remember the people who are fighting this war:  the dead, the living. 

We pray that as we remember that those still in Iraq find their way home to their families at the end of their tours as we recommit ourselves to remembering that they are there. 



Erev Rosh Hashanah 5768 The Instrument of Teshuvah
- Rabbi David Novak

Of all the instruments in the world, the shofar has to be one of the lowliest.
There's no Steinway and Sons shofar showroom.
There's no brass to polish or reeds to buy.
There are no strings to break, no case to carry it in.
You cannot take a class in shofar sounding at Julliard or the New England Conservatory.
None of us will ever hear a shofar symphony or a pop music song sung to the mellifluous melody of the shofar.
One is hard pressed, really, to even put it in the same genre as instruments.
Yet like the flute and clarinet you have to push air through it.
Like the trombone and trumpet, it sounds.
In short, the shofar is in a class of its own.
And what of its music?
What is it about this instrument that bleats its most primitive, almost primal, sound?
And in the constellation of instruments, what attracts the Jewish soul, year after year, to the sounding of the shofar?
The answer is that the shofar is the instrument of Rosh HaShanah and its music is the music of teshuvah.
Sound the shofar has a singular and umistakable purpose:
To grab our attention.
That's it -- not a fancy theological purpose as is suggested by Jewish thinkers over time.
To grab our attention.
Not to entertain us.
To grab our attention.
And what is the mitzvah of shofar? The religious obligation connected with the shofar?
Is it to see it being played--such as when we go to a concert and watch a symphony and sololist play?
Or is it something else? Something deeper, something more profound, more stirring, more primal, something that goes beyond language's ability to communicate?
The mitzvah of shofar is in its hearing.
And it is a symbiotic mitzvah: the person sounding the shofar makes the blessing and sounds the shofar--yet what that does is allow all of us to fulfill the mitzvah of hearing the shofar.
If I have learned anything about this congregation since June, it is that we are a congregation of thinkers, deep thinkers, who regularly wrestle with important and complex emotions, situations, issues. We use our gifts of intellect and emotion to seek our way through the thicket of conflicting ideas and try to come up with the best possible solution.
The sounding of the shofar, quite literally, pushes all of that aside.
It pierces the mind, breaks through the noise, digs down deep, and sweeps free impediments along the way.
It is a sensory drill.
Each sound echoes to a depth that cannot be measured.
For this is a time of terurah, the Torah tells us, a time for the sounding of the shofar.
In the Torah all that is said about Rosh HaShanah is this: "In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall boserve complete rest, a sacred occasion commemorated with loud blasts. You shall not work at your occupations; and you shall bring an offering by fire to the Eternal.
In Hebrew it is a day of "teruah," a day of making loud blasts.
There must be something to it, this noise that the shofar makes.
It is not pastoral.
It is not comforting.
They are loud blasts.
It is not, truth be told, pleasing to hear for an extended amount of time.
What it is is jarring.
And that's what it SHOULD do.
The shofar is sounded to jar us out of our complacency.
The shofar is sounded to make us examine ourselves, deep within.
It is a jolt of sonic energy, taken in through the ears from where it can spread throughout your entire being.
The piercing cries of the shofar. . .the short sounds...the long sounds...the crying sounds...all in a rhythm that is a call to consciousness.
Each sound a question:
What are you going to do with this one singular life of yours?
What are you doing NOW with this one singular life of yours?
Not easy questions.
Not things we eagerly or readily want to spend thinking about.
Which is why the shofar is, in its simplicity, a radically important instrument.
It is an instrument of awareness.
Arthur Green teaches that the sounds made on the shofar contain symbolic resonance, the dream of restored wholeness, prayer before words, a wordless SHOUT.
The tekiah. A whole note.
The shevarim -- a tripartite broken sound whose very name means "breakings." I started off whole, the shofar says, and I became broken.
Teru'ah, a staccato series of blast fragments, saying, "I was entirely smashed to pieces."
But each series has to end with with a new teki'ah, promising wholeness once more. The shofar cries out a hundred times on Rosh Hashanah: "I was whole, I was broken, even smashed to bits, but I shall be whole again!"
The tekiah!
The sh'varim!
The teru'ah!
It is the shofar. Listen. Hear.
Tekiah g'dolah!!!!


 

Rosh Hashanah Morning 5768 
Why It's Good to Make Mistakes
- Rabbi David Novak
 
There's something about these Days of Awe that point to a measure of human failure.
I am fairly certain in stating that this is not the way that most of us want to spend our time -- not now, not ever.
Who wants to be reminded that it's yet another year and you're once again going through a list of ways we humans go off the rails.
Over and over again, we give voice to a veritable list of ways we hurt ourselves, we hurt each other, and God.
Over and over again, we list our actions, a list of how we humans choose to use our agency in ways that are less than salutary.
It's not bad enough that there is one alphabetical list -- there are two! Both follow a literary style that conveys the comprehensiveness of our human failures. Whether we've done one, two, all or none -- it points to how we human beings function--or should I say disfunction.
What becomes apparent is that we use our human freedom to veer off course.
It's not good for us. It's not good for other human beings.
Yet. . . we do it.
Because it would be impossible to perform teshuvah, to repair relationships with ourselves and with others if we were perfect.
Perfection itself is an imperfect aspiration.
Perfect people don't grow.
Pefect people don't exist.
People who make mistakes, do.
So here is my radical idea at this time of focusing on where we miss the mark:
It is good to make mistakes.
You heard me: it is good to make mistakes.
Now don't get me wrong.
I'm not talking about mistakes made by professional malpractice,
mistakes that cause physical injury,
or mistakes done with the intention of destroying another person.
I'm also not talking about maliciousness done with intent.
These are not mistakes -- they are much worse.
What I am speaking of are those mistakes that we can learn from,
those mistakes that are made honestly, accidentally, without intention.
Mistakes happen for good reason and no reason at all. Usually they happen -- well -- by mistake.
Under the good reason category, there are mistakes that happen because you are stretching yourself. You are trying something new, like speaking a new language, a new sport, or anything else that puts you squarely outside of your comfort zone.
Let me give you a personal example.
In my rabbinical school training, not much emphasis is put on chanting from the Torah.
Many of my colleagues would rather have a teeth pulled than attempt to make sense of the Hebrew letters on the Torah scroll, written, as they are, without punctuation, vowels, or cantillation marks.
In other words, if you are up on the bimah reading from the Torah you need to know where to start, where to end, how to pronounce the words, and what notes to chant. Foreign language? Check. Fumbling around looking for the starting and ending points? Check. Complicated pronunciation? Check. Remembering the notes? Check.
Or at least that's what you hope. What happens, though, is sometimes you get up there and one part of it flies out of your mind--a section that was chanted beautifully not five minutes before for the one hundredth time escapes your head completely.
And then it happens: you are up there and you make a mistake. And if you're in my position, you're making a public mistake.
So what do you do?
You have several choices.
You can be embarrassed.
You can apologize.
You can try not to react when you hear about your mistake being retold to others later.
Or:
You can keep doing it.
You can keep learning several verses in the Torah and try to chant them week after week.
Sometimes making similar mistakes.
But over time what happens is that the mistakes are themselves growth marks, like rings in a tree, marking the growth of a person.
That's another reason why making mistakes are essential for being human.
Living life is a process of living and learning, making mistakes and growing from them. Without the opportunity for growth, our lives would become static, stuck in a place where being called-out for mistakes paralyzes ever being willing to grow outside of your safety zone.
So if mistakes are so important for our development as humans, why then, do we spend so much time at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur year regretting them?
And is it an all or nothing proposition? Is perfection the religious value being fostered? Or is it something more subtle?
Let's go back to idea of growth. Knowledge, properly assimilated into one's being, has the potential to lead to growth.
In the Torah, we see that God is not portrayed as a Being that is perfect. God destroyed the created world in the Noah epic. In one fit of rage after another, God's anger leads to the destruction of the people He has brought out of slavery.
This behavior often leaves us bewildered or even turned off. Some have suggested that God was learning about His creation as His creation was learning about God.
Our holy texts also portray the Biblical human as far from perfect. In fact, they were pretty good at making mistakes.
They created and danced around a golden calf.
They complained incessantly.
They failed to have faith in God.
They wanted to turn around and go back to Egypt.
They gave false reports of the Promised Land.
In piques of anger at a nation of former slaves, anxious and scared in the desert, God is described, with nostrils flaring in anger, as mowing down those involved, over and over, for the people being, well, human. They made mistakes. They paid with their lives.
Yet the knowledge of these stories, what we have inherited, give us the opportunity to compare ourselves to our Biblical ancestors, lo these many years into the future, and we see that yes, human beings in the Bible were fallible.
This is a time of the year for all of us to acknowledge our mistakes, myself included, to take stock of them, to learn what is learn able, and to try to keep from repeating the same mistakes.
Each mistake is a chance to grow.
Each mistake is a chance to learn.
One mistake should not, cannot be made: to replace our human nature that learns from its mistakes with a definition of perfection that seals us off from life. Mistakes do not exist to cause embarrassment or to hold over another person's head.
Let our mistakes be what they are -- painful, maybe personally embarrassing, clumsy, sometimes even stupid.
But let us strive not for perfection, but for growth that comes from our human nature, our human nature of making mistakes.



Kol Nidre Sermon 5768 
Talk
- Rabbi David Novak
 
This is a talk about---Talk.
More specifically, it's about talking.
Something we Jews are quite good at.
Some of you may remember a time in early June when I last spoke about talking; it was my first time in this privileged position that you have given to me, this place on the pulpit to speak publicly.
If you will recall, the Torah portion that week was about the scouts who Moses sent into the Promised Land to assess what challenges may lie before them.
Moses was politically smart - all of the people would be coming to this new place, so the report would have to come from representatives from all of the tribes.
Twelve chieftans were appointed to go, a leader from each tribe. Twelve is a number that means that in all likelihood you will get different opinions, but there would be probably enough of a consensus to get a fair report.
When the scouts returned to the wandering Israelites in the desert, to the generation who had seen God redeem them from slavery, to the people who had stood at Sinai at the time of the revelation of Torah, they gave their report of what lay in front of them in the Promised Land, the land that God said they will take with God's help.
The people? Powerful--giants.
The fruit of the vine? Immense.
Friend or foe? The enemies of the Israelites, everywhere.
The chance that we could ever accomplish conquering the land? Little to none.
"We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we," they told all the people. "The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are men of great size; we saw the Nephilim there---and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them." (Num: 13:31-33)
Joshua and Caleb, two of the twelve, strenuously protested this erroneous report.
They said: "The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land. If YHVH is pleased with us, He will bring us into that land, a land that flows with milk and honey, and give it to us. Only you must not rebel against YHVH. Have no fear then of the people of the country, for they are our prey. Their protection has departed from them, but YHVH is with us. Have no fear of them!" (Num:14: 6-10)
The people's response?
They threatened to pelt Joshua and Calev with stones!
It was ten-to-two and the people would have none of what Joshua and Calev were saying.
The people formed their opinions after the majority.
They did not want to hear the truth.
And with the erroneous information, the people were off and running. Repeating what they heard---one to another to another to another.
Their focus was on the impending disaster they perceived, a disaster only because people believed the scouts' erroneous report and fostered anxiety among themselves.
The two who were telling the truth - that the land is beautiful and manageable, well, they are in fear of their lives.
And God? God runs out of patience, saying to Moses, "How lon will this people spurn Me, and how long will they have no faith in Me despite all the signs that I have performed in their midst? I will strike them with a pestilence and disown them, and I will make of you a nation far more numerous than they!" But Moses persuades God to temper the anger, using YHVH's own words: "The lord&emdash;slow to anger and abounding in kindness, forgiving iniquity and transgressions. . .Pardon, I pray, the inquity of this people according to your great kindness. . ." And YHVH said, "I pardon as you ask…"

This is the same language we use in our Yom Kippur services.
But herein lies the punishment for this generation:
They will die out in the desert, not seeing fulfilled, with their own eyes, God's promise to bring them to a land of milk and honey.
It was a case of false information that was repeated that led to the disintegration of an entire community. It was, by any measure, a tragedy of epic proportions.
False information, based in anxiety and designed to frighten, took hold.
The truth no longer mattered.
In fact, it was next to impossible for the people to realize what the truth was.
And it destroyed their future as they wandered for another 38 years, waiting, literally, for the generation to die out.
It is a story that resonates to this day, for we human beings are still speaking.

Tonight we turn our attention to speaking.
We will, over the next 24 hours, make confession and ask for forgiveness for a range of ways in which we live our lives where we use our human powers, the agency that we have been given to make choices, and we choose wrong.
In the viddui, the confessional, and in the Al Het, for the list of sins, each is an acrostic, running the gamut of the Hebrew alphabet.
The idea is that the complete range of human behavior for which we are repenting and seeking forgiveness is covered.
If a human can do it, it's covered.
Yet there is one way that we humans err that is more pervasive than others.
It is how we use our power of communication, the combination of brain, senses, voice-box, tongue and air that becomes the language we speak.
It takes all of that to create speech. It all happens so quickly--thought to tongue to words. We humans are remarkable creations.
Yet given this great gift of speaking and understanding, we easily misuse it.
But don't think for a second that I am speaking of only one kind of speaking.
Our tradition in its wisdom acknowledges that using our gift of speech poorly has many manifestations in which it can go bad.

One has to look no farther than the liturgy that we are doing tonight and tomorrow, our sacred ritual for Yom Kippur.
First we have the viddui. The ay-ya-ya-ya and the breast beating as we go through the 22-item list. And out of the 22 on the list? How many would you guess have to do with speech?
D'barnoo doofi. Spoken slander. In other words, we use speech to tear down others by saying things that degrade another human's reputation.
Taphalnew sheker: Added falsehood on falsehood. Meaning that one lie can easily beget another.
Yaatzno rah. Given evil advice. Knowlingly giving counsel that another person may take, leading to an untoward outcome.
Latzno. We have mocked.
But that's not all. Oh no.
Then there is the Al Heyt, the acrostic list, sometimes a single acrostic, sometimes a double acrostic that begins "Al heyt sh-hatanew l'phanecha: For the sin we have committed before you.
Bveetooi spatayim. For the utterance of the lips.
Debor peh: Misusing speech.
Vidoi Peh: Insincere confession.
Tepshoot peh. Foolish talk (idle talk and gossip)
Toomat siphatayiim: with impurity of the lips -- profanity and unclean language
Leshon hara. STUPID TALK., literally evil talk (slander)
Latzone: scoffing-ridiculing a person
RCHELOOT: GOSSIPING. Talebearing.
Shvoat Shav: Swearing in vain.
Look how many ways we can use speech to go off the rails. All of these fall into these broad categories:
(a) speaking without thinking
(b) speaking to shared information that has no business being shared or repeated
(c) speaking to insult another person, to the face, or behind the back
(d) profane, garbage talk
and finally---in a category of its own, insincere confession, Viddui Peh.
Speaking without thinking, gossiping, insulting, and garbage talk: it is obvious as to the why one should not do that. It's hurtful. It's disrespectful. It reflects poorly on you. It can take-on a life of its own. It can leave a person reeling. It can destroy relationships. It can cause the break down of community.

You know all of this. You don't need me up here reminding you of this. Because the liturgy will do that for you over the next day.
Yet that, too, requires focus. For most of us, our time of confession is but this time of year, this day of Yom Kippur. Our viduii peh, the confession of the lips, is what we do to reconcile our relationships with God. If these words have any familiarity, it is from this liturgy.
If you're like me, you often wonder: why oh why does the liturgy repeat itself? Why is what we do tonight done again tomorrow morning, early afternoon, late afternoon, and in the case of Yom Kippur, that one-time-a-year extra Neilah service?
Isn't one time enough? Doesn't my intellect warrant a more interesting liturgy?
I have one answer: viduii peh. What is the nature of the words that you and I are using, tonight and tomorrow, to reflect our true sincerity in our confessing?
This repetition offers us the opportunity to penetrate our defenses that are part of who we are the rest of the year, to look at the parts of ourself that are not so easy to confront, and to get to a level of personal honesty.
Which is why throughout the hours of Yom Kippur, we repeat these same words because we, ourselves, have the potential to come to these words differently each time.
Here is another suggestion, powerful in its subtlety:
Given all of the ways we abuse speech, we use this one day to direct all of those elements that we can so readily abuse---the tongue, the brain, the voice box, the air, the language to a different kind of language.
For one day our speech is directed away from how we abuse it and taken to a higher place, demonstrating a way of being in the world where speech, properly channeled, is a powerful instrument of interaction.
Hopefully, like hearing a song that you can't get out of your head, they will continue to rumble around inside of you long after the gates of Yom Kippur close tomorrow night.
Take note your recitation of them tonight&emdash;and again tomorrow morning and afternoon. Then---during the Neilah service, the final, fifth service, where we stand before the open Ark, take note of what the experience is like then, when you know you have this one last time to utter them.
And then there is this:
All we humans have to communicate are words. And we are communicating to the One who needs no language. Which is why in directing our speech this one day our language finds its power in conveying the deepest recesses of the human to an Infinite Other.
Yet we need reminders not just on Yom Kippur of the power of our speaking.
We need reminders every day to make us conscious of the incredible power of talk. Which is why we can look to our liturgical inheritance and find this positive statement in Psalm 34, affirming the power of speech when it is used for good and the power of humans to seek and do good and build harmony in the world:

Mi ha-ish hehchaphatz chaiim
Who is the person that desires life
Ohav yamim lirote tov.
Who loves days of seeing good?
Nitzor lshoncha marah
Guard your tongue from evil
Ospatecha midarbare mirma
And guard your tongue from speaking deceit
Soor mayrah vasay tov
Turn from evil and do good,
bkaysh shalom v'radphayhoo
Seek peace and pursue it.
As we recite the words, as we hear our words, as we think about our words, as we remember the power of speech and the choices we have, let us pray:
May the words of my mouth and the thoughts of my heart find favor before You, God, my rock and my redeemer.