Rabbi Heidi Hoover's blog

You Are Not Alone--Yom Kippur sermon 2012/5773

The anthem for this sermon was Mary Chapin Carpenter's Here I Am.

This is it. This is the big day, the last opportunity for atonement during this year’s Days of Awe. We will recite again the prayers we have been reciting through this season, and at the end of the day we will experience the N’ielah service—our last, desperate attempt to have our say, to plead for redemption and forgiveness, when we are weakened by hunger and thirst, and thereby opened up and made more vulnerable, more willing to humble ourselves.

Last night I spoke about how lonely it can be when you don’t feel good about yourself, how easy it can be to feel that you’re the only one with doubts, the only one with fears, the only one who lacks confidence. I also spoke about the fact that none of us is the only one who ever feels that way—most of us have felt inadequate at some times in our lives.

Some of you know that my favorite television show of all time is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is about a young woman in high school, then college, who is the one girl in all the world chosen to battle the forces of darkness—vampires, demons, and other monsters. I’m not going to go at length into the genius of the show, because I’d go on all day and we’d never get to the break-fast. Suffice it to say that it’s available on Netflix and on dvd if you want to check it out. One of the themes of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series is that first of all, the reason Buffy is the best slayer ever, more successful than those who came before her, is that she is not isolated—she has friends, a support system. At the same time, another theme is that ultimately, she is always alone when it comes to the life-or-death moments. In fact, we are all alone at those times.

One of the crucial elements of the Days of Awe is that while we must face our own past alone, and face God alone, right now we are all facing God alone at the same time, which means that we are alone together. Rather like Buffy and her friends, while we are ultimately alone with our past deeds and the decisions we make about how to remedy past wrongs, having friends and loved ones, having a support system, makes a huge difference.

That is one of the reasons to belong to a Jewish community. Not only do we come together on the Days of Awe to share the experience of atonement, but the community members are there for each other throughout the year, in celebration and in grief, as well as in regular, warm fellowship, when there is nothing in particular to celebrate or grieve.

On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, we read the story of the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac. When God calls to Abraham, to tell him to sacrifice his son Isaac, God calls, “Abraham!” and Abraham answers, “Hineini.” Hineini is usually translated as “Here I am.” Sometimes it is translated as, “I am ready,” because that is its implication.

I remember when I was a child, at dinnertime my father would shout through the house to my siblings and me, “Heidi! Gordon! Brenda!” and I would shout back, “What?!” One time he got really angry and yelled at me, saying, “When I call you, you don’t say, ‘what,’ you say, ‘coming!’” From then on, when he called me, I’d say, “Coming!” and go downstairs. Responding “hineini” when someone calls is kind of like saying “coming” instead of “what?”

Abraham says “Hineini” to God three times in the Torah reading from the first day of Rosh Hashanah: The first I’ve already mentioned, when God first speaks to him to tell him to sacrifice Isaac. The second is when Isaac and Abraham are climbing the mountain, and Isaac speaks to ask about where the lamb is for the sacrifice. Isaac opens the conversation, “Father?” and Abraham answers, “Hineini, b’ni.” “I am here, my son.” The third is when the messenger of God stops Abraham from slaughtering Isaac at the last minute, calling out, “Avraham! Avraham!” and Abraham answers, “Hineini”—here I am. The word hineini also appears in our haftarah portion for this morning, from the book of Isaiah, in the context of God answering “hineini,” “here I am,” when we call out to God.

 Each of these instances of “hineini” has different implications, though the meaning of the phrase itself doesn’t change.

In the first, when God addresses Abraham, Abraham’s response of “hineini” is that of a loyal follower, a servant or employee. It is an expression of profound trust. Abraham is saying, “I am here, and prepared to do your will, even though I don’t know what it is yet.” We see here the responsibility that exists on both sides of that trust. The follower or employee has taken on the responsibility of obeying any order that is given, no matter what it is. The one giving the order has the responsibility to give an order that will not harm the one taking the order. This applies in any relationship where there is an imbalance of power. The boss, the master, the leader has the opportunity to abuse their authority—the subordinate will do whatever they are told. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the one with more power not to give an order that will be too hard, or too painful, or just unrealistic. The one with more power in the relationship needs to deserve the trust being placed in him or her with that “Hineini,” that “Here I am, prepared to do anything you ask of me.”

The second “hineini” in the Akeidah, the story of the Binding of Isaac, is from father to son, and it’s very different. Isaac, wondering what exactly is going to be sacrificed (and perhaps having an idea about that), says, “Father?” and Abraham, who knows exactly what the sacrifice is to be, says, “Hineini, b’ni.” “I am here, my son.” This is such a poignant moment. While we say easily, “When God told him to sacrifice his son, he should have said, ‘no way!’” I absolutely believe that to Abraham, there was no choice here. This hineini is reminiscent of parenthood in general. Our children must navigate the minefields of friendship and growing up, their hearts being broken by friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, and all we can do is say, “I am here and I love you. I can’t take away your pain, but I am here.” Beyond parenthood, our friends and other loved ones experience loss, marriage troubles, serious illness, difficulties with their families, and all we can give them is, “I am here and I love you.” And for those in the worst situations, the ones most like Abraham’s, when a friend or loved one is facing a terminal illness, we have nothing to say but, “I am here. I love you, and I will be here with you until the end.”

The third hineini in the Akeidah comes when the messenger of God calls to Abraham at the moment he is about to slaughter his son, “Avraham! Avraham!” and Abraham says, “Hineini.” This hineini is about desperation. “Yes, I am here, I’ll do what you want, but for God’s sake, help me and tell me to do something that will help me and get me out of this situation.” This is the hineini that is a cry for help. It is the “here I am” of someone stuck in a miserable job, in an abusive relationship, in addiction, in poverty. It is the “here I am” of the invisible ones in our society, the ones waiting for someone to notice them, to say their name and hold out a helping hand, the ones who want to get out of where they are but can’t do it alone.

The fourth hineini, the one from our haftarah portion this morning, ties together all three of the instances of hineini in the Akeidah. Our haftarah portion, from the book of Isaiah, addresses the issue of fasting, and the fact that fasting alone—simply depriving our bodies of food and water but otherwise behaving no differently—is not what God wants of us. We read:

“They ask Me for the right way, they are eager for the nearness of God, [they say]: ‘Why, when we fasted, did You not see? When we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed?’ Because on your fast day you see to your business and oppress all your laborers! Because you fast in strife and contention, and you strike with a wicked fist! Your fasting today is not such as to make your voice heard on high. Is such the fast I desire, a day for people to starve their bodies?.... No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe them, and do not ignore your own flesh…. Then, when you call, Adonai will answer; when you cry, [God] will say: ‘Hineini—Here I am’” (Isaiah 58:2–7, 9, translation: Machzor Lev Shalem).

Here we see the flip side of the first hineini from Abraham to God, from the submissive one in the relationship to the dominant one. Not only must the powerful one be worthy of the trust of having the other say “here I am, ready to do anything you say,” but the less powerful member of the relationship must also be worthy of the “here I am” of the powerful one. God will not respond to a people who just say the words of the confessions, who fast but do not make any effort to stop sinning, says our haftarah. If we call to God and want God to say, “Here I am, ready to be your support and your help,” we must do our part and recognize our failings and try to address them. This sounds like conditional love, and to an extent, it is. This is more applicable to an employer/employee relationship than to a parent/child relationship.

An employee who doesn’t deliver, or who keeps making the same mistakes over and over, does not earn the trust of the employer. Therefore, when that employee gets into trouble with a client or a colleague, their words or apologies will not earn them the support of their manager. Rather, it is the employee’s actions, changes to behavior and performance, that earn them unquestioning support from a good manager.

The hineini in our haftarah connects to the hineini from Abraham to Isaac on the mountain about the lamb for the sacrifice, and to the hineini from Abraham to the messenger who stops the knife, in what we are expected to do in order to merit a hineini from God. Essentially, God in our haftarah says, “You want me to be there for you? How were you there for other people? It is by your saying, ‘here I am, ready to support you, to help you, to be there for you’ to the people you encounter, that you become worthy of My saying ‘here I am, ready to support you, to help you, to be there for you,’ to you!”

Every time we hold a child or other loved one in their pain, prepared to just be there with them even if we can’t change anything, we become worthy of God’s being there for us. Every time we reach out a hand—through tzedakah, a job offer, mentorship and advice, or whatever we are capable of—to someone who desperately needs support and help to get out of a losing situation, we become worthy of God’s being there for us.

Now, I know that not everyone in this room believes that God is about quid pro quo, you do this and I’ll do that. I don’t even believe that. So what do I mean when I say that God will be there for us if we do these things: make sure we are employers or employees worthy of trust, support those we love whose situations we cannot change, and assist those we can help? What I mean is that when we cultivate these behaviors, and when we recognize that they are what God wants from us (whether God means tradition, some kind of supernatural being, or the ethical ideal we are trying to live up to), we will be more open to feeling God’s support, and recognizing that God’s support is what we are getting when we get a hineini, a “here I am,” from someone in our lives.

Because saying that God wants us to support and help others, and be worthy of their help and support, is just another way of saying that the reason we are here, in this world, is to make it better for our fellow human beings and ourselves, and that there is satisfaction in helping others, and that we each need support and love too.

As we pray today to be sealed for another year of life, to have another year to care for others and be cared for by them, may we recognize with gratitude all of those who have said, “Here I am,” to us in the past year, without placing any conditions on that willingness to help us. May we in the coming year increase our ability to say “Here I am,” to those we love, to our Jewish community, and to those in our society who need someone to notice them and help them. May we both receive and give support, as we are able. Most of all, may we realize that we are not alone, and may we help others realize that they are not alone. Amen and g’mar chatimah tovah—may you be sealed for a good life in the coming year.

Not Good Enough?--Kol Nidrei sermon 2012/5773

L.M. Montgomery, author of the Anne of Green Gables series, wrote a less well-known series of books called Emily of New Moon. These books are aimed at young adults, but like many good books of that genre, they have much to recommend them to adults as well. Emily of New Moon is a trilogy that I return to again and again when I’m looking for the literary equivalent of comfort food. The title character is a budding author. Her family is not particularly supportive of her ambition, but she’s plucky and determined. Nevertheless, there are times when she doubts herself. In one passage, she says, “Last night I mulled over a story for hours and concluded despairingly that I could never write—that it was no use to try—that I couldn’t do anything really worth while. I went to bed on that note and drenched my pillow with tears. Woke up at three and couldn’t even cry. Tears seemed as foolish as laughter—or ambition. I was quite bankrupt in hope and belief” (Emily’s Quest, p. 7). Elsewhere she refers to these nights of waking up in despair at 3:00 in the morning as “white nights.”

Now, I don’t wake up at three in the morning. When I have a crisis of confidence, it tends to hit at the end of a day, when I’m lying in bed trying to fall asleep. I might get stuck in a cycle of running a conversation or situation over and over in my head, wishing I’d done or said something different. And at those times, it is quite clear to me that I’m not good enough. Not a good enough mother, not a good enough wife, not a good enough friend, not a good enough daughter, not a good enough rabbi.

I want to pause here and acknowledge that it may be uncomfortable for some of you to hear your rabbi say that she’s not a good enough rabbi. It makes me a little uncomfortable to share this with you. Even in this era of Facebook and unprecedented online openness about one’s life, it’s frankly a little frightening. It still feels like rabbis aren’t supposed to show weakness, especially not to their congregations. But I think it’s important to share it because, while I don’t know it for sure, I think many of you probably also feel not good enough sometimes. And it’s something we don’t talk about much, so it’s very easy to believe we are alone in not feeling good enough.

There’s an idea in the world of 12-step addiction and recovery programs that when we look around at others and say, “That person is so together, so strong, so confident, so much better at living than I am,” what we’re doing is comparing our back room to their front room. We know everything that’s going on inside us, all our fears, insecurities and inadequacies, and we compare that to what someone else shows the world. What we forget is that the face we show the world also hides the often-roiling emotions inside. When people look at us, they see our front room, which is much neater and better put together than the back room. But we tend not to compare our front room to other people’s front rooms, but to compare our messy back room to their neat front rooms.

So tonight, I’m giving you a glimpse into my back room, letting you know that I sometimes don’t feel good enough, so that you know that if that’s going on in your back room, that you too sometimes don’t feel good enough, well, you’re not the only one.

We might think that the whole point of the Days of Awe, the season of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, is to engender this feeling of inadequacy. After all, we spend this time examining our souls and our behavior throughout the past year, looking for the things we did wrong—all the times we spoke harshly to a loved one, blamed someone else for our mistake, gleefully passed on gossip, or whatever else we may have done. This intense focus on our errors, on our sins, might easily lead us to despair—how could we ever be good enough when we have screwed up this much?

But the Days of Awe are not about making us feel inadequate, destined to lie awake at night feeling rotten. There are three reasons that I say this: First, because often when we feel inadequate it is because we are comparing ourselves to others. Second, the standard to which we are holding ourselves when we feel that way is not fair or realistic. And finally, an important part of the Days of Awe is releasing ourselves from our sins, recognizing that forgiveness is available to us, year after year.

I’ve already mentioned the tendency to compare our own back room to other people’s front room. Inherent in that, of course, is that we are comparing ourselves to other people. This is not what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are about. At no point in our liturgy do I recite, “I have sinned by not being as good a rabbi as the rabbi whose piece I read in the Huffington Post today.” At no point do we recite, “We have sinned by not being parents as good as those parents down the block, the ones who never raise their voices and yet their kids are always in clean clothes with their hair brushed, and behave themselves.” Rather, during the Days of Awe we compare ourselves to the selves we want to be. It’s not about what someone else is able to accomplish; it’s about what each one of us is trying to accomplish on our own terms, with our own limitations and challenges.

There is a story from the Chasidic tradition about Reb Zussya. “The students of Reb Zusya, hearing that their teacher was about to die, came to pay him one last visit. But entering the room, they were surprised to see him trembling with fear.

‘Why are you afraid of death?’ they asked. ‘In your life, have you not been as righteous as Moses himself?’

‘When I stand before the throne of judgment,’ Zusya answered, ‘I will not be asked, ‘Reb Zusya, why were you not like Moses?’ I will be asked, ‘Reb Zusya, why were you not like Zusya?’”

We are not expected to be like anyone else, to meet challenges the same way they do, to make the same choices, to cope with hardship the same way. We are expected to be like ourselves—the best version of ourselves. That is what we are striving toward on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Even if we are managing not to compare ourselves to someone else, sometimes the standard to which we our holding ourselves is unrealistic and unfair. When you’re beating yourself up for a mistake you’ve made, or for losing your temper, or for something else, what is the standard you did not live up to? I think some of us expect perfection from ourselves; we think we should be able to live without ever getting anything wrong. Anything serious, anyway. This is actually a little bit arrogant. As Golda Meir famously said, “Don’t be so humble, you’re not that great.” I’d paraphrase it a bit, and say, “Don’t be so hard on yourself, you’re not that great.”

Being able to honestly welcome criticism and mistakes as a way to learn and grow, then incorporate the lesson and move on, is greater, healthier, and more productive than endlessly berating yourself for something. The Days of Awe are about looking at ourselves honestly, drawing the lessons from the past year and moving on. This season actually gives us tools, if we are able to use them, to let go of past wrongdoing so that it does not drag us down into self-loathing.

We are human, after all, and in Judaism there is a profound recognition of our humanness. Our rabbis acknowledge that there is a good inclination, a yetzer hatov, and an evil inclination, the yetzer ha-ra, in each of us, all the time. We are all capable and pulled toward both good and evil. Sometimes evil will come out on top, because we are human. We will never meet the goal of only being good, all the time. And the fact that we sometimes do allow the evil inclination to prevail doesn’t make us bad people, it just makes us people. Our goal is for the good inclination to prevail more often.

One of my very favorite books, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, is Good Omens. It’s not a Jewish book, and in fact centers on the coming of the antiChrist, which is not at all a part of Jewish theology. Nevertheless, one of the primary themes of the book is profoundly Jewish. Over and over, Good Omens makes the point that humans are neither angels nor demons, but are fundamentally human, and that because of our free will, we are capable of more goodness than Heaven ever envisioned and more evil than Hell could imagine. 

As Jews, the Days of Awe are the time of year when we try to become more honest with ourselves, seeing both our flaws and our strengths, and accepting ourselves as we are, while continually trying to capitalize on our strengths and make our weaknesses less prominent in our lives. In the language of psychology, we try to move toward self-actualization. In the language of Star Wars, we try to be more like Jedi. We recognize that there will always, every year, be actions and words that we regret from the past year, and that this is normal. We also recognize that forgiveness is available to us, and that we can go on—there is redemption. How brilliant is it, that our tradition gives us this mechanism, every year, to release ourselves through atonement from the things that keep us awake at night? It is an incredible gift—the opportunity to reflect, to reveal ourselves to ourselves, to release ourselves from the pain of wrongdoing that drags us down, to start anew.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are not about feeling like we aren’t good enough. They are about our being human, recognizing and accepting ourselves as human beings who are struggling, flailing, wandering, and reaching for a way to be healthier, practice justice and mercy, and just be better—for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for those around us. They are a gift that sends us a message of hope: You are normal, you can make amends, you can be better. And next year you’ll have a chance to do this again. And the fact is, every day is a chance to do it again.

It is also a fact that there will probably still be what Emily of New Moon calls white nights, the nights when we lie awake, not believing in ourselves, not understanding why other people do. Let us remember that after the night comes a day when we will keep doing our work as best we can, keep living as best we can, and that, in fact, this is exactly what is expected of us. May this Yom Kippur day be our reminder that we are not ever going to be more than human, and each of us needs to cut ourself some slack and simultaneously recognize where we can improve. As we do so, may we feel the support of God and our loved ones to help us. Amen and g’mar chatimah tovah—may you be sealed in the book of life for a good year to come.

Paying Attention--Rosh Hashanah morning sermon 2012/5773

The anthem for this sermon was Live Like We're Dying.

In a little while we will read from the Torah, and today’s Torah reading is the story of the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac. This is a familiar story. Abraham is commanded by God to bring Isaac to a mountain three days’ journey from their home, and sacrifice him. Abraham duly takes Isaac up the mountain and prepares for the sacrifice, which God stops at the last minute, and a ram is sacrificed instead. The rabbis of the midrash, who told stories to explain contradictions or absences in the text, have had a lot to say about this story, as have rabbinic and modern commentators.

Rabbi Joshua Heller points out that we read in the Bible many conversations between God and Abraham, but only one between Abraham and Isaac. That’s the conversation they have on the way up the mountain in the story we’ll read shortly, when Isaac comments that they have wood and fire for the sacrifice, but no lamb. Where, he asks, is the lamb going to come from? Abraham replies, evasively, that God will provide the lamb. That’s it, the only conversation the Bible tells us that Abraham and Isaac had.

The Bible typically uses few words to tell its stories and make its points, and the relationship between Abraham and God is frankly more relevant to the Bible’s reason for being than the relationship between Abraham and Isaac. That could explain why other interactions between them are not recorded. However, taking the text we have as it is, Rabbi Heller speculates that perhaps Abraham didn’t spend much time with Isaac; maybe they didn’t have many conversations. When Isaac was young, Sarah demanded that his older brother, Ishmael, and Ishmael’s mother Hagar be expelled from their household. Abraham was distressed at this, but God told him to do what Sarah said, and he did. Perhaps that experience made the idea of becoming close with Isaac frightening, in case something happened to Isaac too. Perhaps Abraham even felt resentful of Isaac for the loss of Ishmael. Or perhaps Abraham, who was a wealthy man with a large household, was simply too busy managing things to find time to spend with his boy.

There is a midrash on our text that is very clear that Abraham loves his son. At the beginning of the story, God tells Abraham, “Take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac….” The midrash wonders why it is necessary for the text to have four descriptors of Isaac, and answers the question by saying that Abraham responded to each of them, in a dialogue.

God says: “Take your son,” and Abraham responds, “I have two sons.” God says, “Your only one,” and Abraham answers, “Each of my sons is the only son of his mother.” God says, “Whom you love,” and Abraham says, “I love both of my sons.” Finally God says, “Isaac,” and Abraham doesn’t answer.

The conversation Abraham and Isaac have, an awkward moment when Isaac notices something crucial missing from the equipment for the sacrifice, does seem like a loving conversation. When Isaac addresses Abraham, “My father,” Abraham answers, “Hineini,” “Here I am,” the same response he gives when God speaks to him, a response that implies attentiveness and readiness to act. When Abraham doesn’t directly answer Isaac’s question, but says, “God will provide the lamb, my son,” we hear both a hint of what is to come—my son is the lamb—as well as an incredibly poignant moment when a father, believing he will be the instrument of his son’s death, doesn’t distance himself from Isaac, but calls him, “my son.”

We might guess that Abraham has always loved his son, but, in the words of Rabbi Heller, “It took the threat of the knife for Abraham to appreciate the relative importance of the signle, unique soul he and Sarah had made together…. It took an unfathomable divine decree for Abraham to be truly present with his son. All of us face the test of Abraham. Will it take a moment of crisis before we walk together with those we love?”

What does he mean by, “All of us face the test of Abraham”? I believe he means that we make choices, all the time, about what our priorities are and where our concentration is. We have a limited time with those we love, but we forget that, all the time. We sacrifice our loved ones on the altar of our busy-ness, and sometimes simply on the altar of our distractedness. These days it’s not just about long hours at the office, though in our country long work hours have become more and more expected. It’s also about our being accessible anytime, anywhere.

This can be good when it means our families can reach us anytime. My 11-year-old daughter started sixth grade this year, with an accompanying leap in independence—traveling on a bus from a private company to school, coming home when there’s no one there, in general doing more out in the world on her own—and I feel confident and comfortable about her doing it because she has a cell phone and I know she can reach me or her father if she needs us.

On the other hand, there is a major downside to this accessibility. As we become more dependent on our iPhones and iPads, our Androids and Blackberries, to connect us to the world and the world to us, it becomes easier and easier to neglect the people in front of us for the people clamoring for our attention in cyberspace. Have you found yourself checking email or Facebook or texting on your phone in a restaurant, or at the dinner table at home with your family? Or while on the phone with someone else? Or sitting in the living room with family or friends? For many of us, the temptation to do so has been increasing, and the split attention is detrimental to our relationships. If we were able to maintain our awareness that our time with our friends and family in this world is limited, maybe we would try harder to focus on the person in front of us right now, but in the whirl of everyday life, most of us just assume that there will always be more time, and of course that is exactly what we want and need to believe.

There was a pop song performed by Kris Allen, released in 2009, called “Live Like We’re Dying.” The song asks questions like, “How come we don’t say ‘I love you’ enough?” and “So if your life flashed before you, what would you wish you would've done?” It also says, “If this is all we got, then we gotta start thinkin’/ If every second counts on a clock that’s tickin’/ Gotta live like we’re dying.” A reviewer in Entertainment Weekly magazine referred to the lyrics as “packing in some sweet, new-age-y sentiments about existing in the moment, living without regret, and saying ‘I love you’ early and often to the people in our lives.” That’s kind of funny, because the sentiments don’t seem new age-y to me at all. Rather, they seem precisely in line with the very old age-y sentiments of the high holidays, and reminiscent of a Talmudic story I shared in the September issue of our newsletter, The Truth. The story goes that Rabbi Eliazar said, “Repent one day before you die.” His disciples asked him, “How does one know on what day he will die?” “All the more reason he should repent today, lest he die tomorrow.” (Shabbat 153a)

The message in the song and the Talmudic story is the same: be mindful. Live in the present. Be fully here right now, today. Experience gratitude for what you have. Make amends to those you have hurt now, so relationships can be mended. Rabbi Jonathan Slater, author of Mindful Jewish Living: Compassionate Practice, advocates mindfulness meditation as a practice that can help cultivate mindfulness in all areas of life.

Mindfulness meditation is deceptively simple. It primarily involves focusing on your breath, just paying attention to the moment. But, says Rabbi Slater, “The natural course of our minds’ activity is to grasp something interesting to analyze, to compare, to judge. The process is exciting, engaging. That is partly why we follow it away into reverie, list-making, discursive story, or judging evaluative thoughts. But when we do that, we lose touch with our intention, and with the immediate reality of our existence in this place, in this moment. The truth of the moment is hidden from us. God, life, experience are obscured from view.” The key is to realize that your mind has taken you away from attention to the moment, and to bring it back. Alison Laichter, executive director of the Jewish Meditation Center here in Brooklyn, teaches that the practice of meditation is, in fact, the practice of bringing your attention back to where you want it to be when it has wandered. Not if it has wandered, but when. Because it always does.

Interestingly, what we are during the Days of Awe is exactly the same thing. We are doing tshuvah, which, in addition to meaning “repent,” means simply, “return.” During the year, our attention wanders from the things that are really important to us—our relationships with loved ones, our loved ones themselves, our ideal of who we really want to be—to the things that distract us from those things—the aggravations of living in New York City; the daily grind of work and housekeeping; perhaps the pressures of caring for young children or elderly parents, and sometimes both at the same time; perhaps the loneliness of having lost loved ones, or facing illness or disability ourselves.

In meditation, returning our awareness to the moment is tshuvah. During the Days of Awe, returning our awareness to what is really important to us is tshuvah. We practice placing our attention, and our intention, our kavannah, not on what is loudest or pushes hardest for our attention, but on what, when we stop and think, we know we care about most.

Mindfulness meditation and the Days of Awe merge when we realize that paying attention to what is most important to us is about being fully awake in the moment. To be aware of the specialness and transience of the touch of a loved one in that moment when you are touching. To be aware of your own needs as an individual, and to be aware of your desires, and to be able to tell the difference between them. To be aware of the working of your own brain in your profession, and to recognize how precious it is to be able to do your work—because when I speak of work taking over our lives and taking away attention from loved ones, I don’t mean that work is invaluable or necessarily unfulfilling, just that when we are at work, we should be fully at work, and when we are with our family and friends, we should be fully with them.

Martin Buber, one of the great Jewish philosophers of the 20^th century, wrote that God is in relationships between people. We Reform Jews are not so comfortable with God-talk. The rationalism of our theology makes it hard to allow for the mystery of God, who can’t be seen and whose existence can’t be proven. I believe that everyone has transcendant experiences in life. Some of us name those experiences “God,” others do not. I would encourage us to look for moments that cause us to gasp in awe: when we look at a spouse or a child or a friend and see them as if with fresh eyes, in all the beauty of their souls, and appreciate them anew; when we encounter something in nature that captures us with its unusualness, or its usualness that somehow we notice this time; when an idea comes to us that is new and exciting, revelatory. These are moments of experiencing truth, the true reality of the moment. What happens if you name those experiences “God”? I do, and find that it broadens the meaning I experience in my life. When I am able to remember that God is in my relationships, between myself and another person, in both of us, it has an impact on my behavior, my consciousness of the other person, and my desire to be at my best in compassion and in integrity.

During this season of the Days of Awe, may we return again and again to the moment: to the prayer we are reciting, to the music we are hearing or singing, to the person next to us or in front of us, to the needs of our souls. And in returning, may we find ourselves appreciating this moment, making the most of the time we have in this world, for ourselves and for those we love. Amen and l’shanah tovah.

Weeding Your Soul--Erev Rosh Hashanah sermon 2012/5773

The anthem for this sermon was Sounds of Silence.

My family is fortunate enough to live in a house with a back yard. The back yard is concrete-topped, but all around the edges there are vines. There’s ivy, morning glory vines, and most of all, a fast-growing pumpkin-type vine that doesn’t bear any fruit, but engulfs everything in its path. Every summer, the vines grow again, and if unchecked, they will take over the playset in our yard, and the picnic table and chairs, and the outdoor unit part of our air conditioner—in short, they will take over everything and turn the yard into a jungle.

Until a week or so ago, we had not touched the vines all summer. They were completely out of control. So on my day off, I decided it was time to tackle them. I went out into the back yard with a big trash can and a pair of rubber gloves. (We have gardening gloves, but I couldn’t find them, which I guess is not that surprising considering how little we get out there and garden.) Much to the confusion and chagrin of the backyard wildlife—bees, spiders, grasshoppers, and cats, mainly—I began ripping vines off the fence that borders the yard, off the concrete, off the furniture.

It wasn’t just vines, of course. There were also other weeds, and tree seedlings, growing at the edges of the yard and in the cracks between the concrete slabs. These other weeds had also had the opportunity to grow quite large. I began yanking at them and stuffing them into the trash can.

All the while, I was thinking, “Why did I let this go on so long? All summer I looked out the window and thought, ‘I need to not let that get out of control this year,’ or, ‘Oh, it’s starting to get messy out there, but it’s too hot today to deal with it,’ or, ‘I have to stop avoiding this, but I’m really busy today and it’s getting to be a big job.’” Then it finally got to where I had to say, “If I don’t get out there today and start taking care of these weeds, we’re not going to have anyplace to build a sukkah this year.”

I’m telling you this story because, while I was battling the plant life in my yard, I was multi-tasking, doing a little cheshbon hanefesh, a little accounting of my soul, and thinking about the high holidays. It occurred to me that all those vines and weeds were not so different from a neglected soul.

Throughout the year, our sins grow like weeds. Some of them anchor themselves firmly and become tall, others entwine themselves insidiously through our daily lives. This is the time of year when we are taught to examine our souls to see what has taken root there and needs to be pulled out. On Rosh Hashanah we mention that we have gone wrong in the past year, and are called to wake up and notice it by the sound of the shofar, but on Rosh Hashanah we don’t get specific about what our wrongs have been. Yom Kippur is when our liturgy includes detailed lists of sins. We chant Ashamnu, which means, “We have sinned.” We repeat the list whose every line begins: Al Cheit Shechatanu Lifanecha, which means, “The sin we have committed against You.”

The sins we mention include: “For passing judgment without knowledge of the facts, and for distorting facts to fit our theories.” “For deceiving ourselves and others with half-truths.” “The sin we have committed against You by fraud and falsehood.” “The sin we have committed against You by malicious gossip.” “The sin we have committed against You by hating without cause.” That’s just a few of them.

Just as there is no way to permanently keep weeds from growing in your yard—even by covering it with concrete—there is no way to keep from sometimes doing things that are wrong. Sometimes we are trying to do something good, and we just miss the mark and there’s a negative, unintended consequence. Sometimes what we’ve done is simply not pay attention, and no one can pay attention all the time. Sometime temptation is greater than our willpower or discipline. Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone always will.

However, there are sins we can avoid. We can learn from our mistakes and endeavor not to repeat them. We can choose not to do or say the same thing in the same situation the next time. We can resist temptation—sometimes at least, if not all the time.

There are some sins that aren’t like weeds growing in your yard. Premeditated murder is the obvious example—that’s not something that sneaks up on you and next thing you know, you’ve done it. But it’s also something that most of us have never done and will never do.

But deception? Sure. Malicious gossip? Without a doubt. Holding onto anger and grudges? That too. Remaining silent in the face of injustice? Yep. I’ve been guilty of all of these at one time or another, and I’ll bet you have been too.

When I was working on the deforestation of the back yard—or perhaps I should say de-jungle-ification—I found that different weeds had different characteristics. The vines were not difficult to pull down, but there were so many of them, their tendrils wrapped around chairs and the fence, reaching across gaps to entwine whatever was available.

Some of the other weeds were much more firmly anchored than the vines, so that though they took over less of the space, they were much harder to get out. I had to resort, at times, to cutting them off at ground level with a pair of plant snippers.

Sins are like that too. Long-held anger and resentment can be a weed that is very strongly anchored. The wife who feels her husband used his job as an excuse to not be fully present to care for their children, but somehow had enough time to be the fun dad when they were older, who keeps adding resentment on top of resentment without ever dealing with it, can find herself after 30 years of marriage carrying around a load of bitterness that is incredibly difficult to uproot. The husband who is wrapped up in his work doesn’t intend to neglect his relationships with his wife and children, but looks up one day, after years of this, to find those relationships distant and troubled, and he may not even know how to get a grip on that weed to pull it out.

Then there are the vines that aren’t so hard to pull up, but that cover everything. Deception is like that. Once you start lying, there often needs to be lie after lie to keep the deception going. It’s easy to slip into a habit of half-truths.

Malicious gossip—lashon ha-ra—fits this category even better. It’s the vine with pretty purple flowers, because the dirty secret of malicious gossip is that it’s fun. You know it’s not good, you know you shouldn’t let it go on, but it’s attractive. And if we let ourselves go and really get into it, boy, does it grow fast, spreading to all parts of our life, until that terrible moment when we realize that we’ve hurt someone because they’ve found out, or because we’ve broken a confidence. When that trust is lost, we realize the truth of an old Chasidic story, which goes like this:

“A man went about the community telling malicious lies about the rabbi. Later, he realized the wrong he had done, and began to feel remorse. He went to the rabbi and begged his forgiveness, saying he would do anything he could to make amends. The rabbi told the man, ‘Take a feather pillow, cut it open, and scatter the feathers to the winds.’ The man thought this was a strange request, but it was a simple enough task, and he did it gladly. When he returned to tell the rabbi that he had done it, the rabbi said, ‘Now, go and gather the feathers. Because you can no more make amends for the damage your words have done than you can recollect the feathers.’”[1]

A third type of sin that easily becomes pervasive, and is in fact pervasive in our society, is in a way the opposite of malicious gossip. It is silence when we should be speaking up. The complicated rules of lashon ha-ra do not say that you’re not committing it as long as you simply don’t talk about anyone. If you know that someone habitually defrauds people, for example, you are obligated to let someone know who is likely to become a victim. In that case, you are supposed to speak negatively of another person, in order to protect someone else who may get hurt.

The sin of silence was evident at Penn State, when for years, Jerry Sandusky sexually abused boys. When we are silent about the injustice around us, we are saying, I don’t care if it happens, as long as it doesn’t happen to me. When we don’t speak, things continue on the same course, and we find ourselves surrounded by so many vines that it’s hard to see the way out, let alone uproot them. What has seemed like a recent rash of shootings, in Colorado, in Ohio, outside the Empire State Building, on Clarkson Avenue, leaves our nation wringing its hands and, it seems, having no idea what the way out of this situation is.

The reason we have this intense period of atonement every year—the month of Elul, Rosh Hashanah, the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and Yom Kippur itself—is that it is so ridiculously easy to neglect the weeds and vines of our sins and let them get out of control. We’re busy. We work, we take care of our families if we have them, we see our friends, we shop, we eat, we sleep, we run from one thing to the next, trying to keep all the balls we’re juggling in the air. Something has to give, and for many of us, it’s the attendance to the needs of our souls, the maintenance of our relationship with the Divine within us. Maybe not in all areas, but in one way or another, we all have a big task of atoning to do.

Some people don’t ignore the weeds all year. They get in there and remind themselves that their impulses need to be kept in check, that there’s a moral and ethical system that they care about and want to live by. There are lots of ways to do this. Daily or weekly worship can help, because it is centering, reminding us of who we want to be. Meditation can help. Some people find that remembering their responsibility to set an example for others can help them stay on the right path. Talking about what ethical or moral behavior is a reminder to practice it.

There are traditional Jewish practices designed to help us think about and do what our tradition teaches is right (which is pretty much the same things that every religious tradition teaches are right). Some of the reminders are: Wearing fringes on our garments. Putting mezuzahs on our doorposts. Reciting blessings before and after eating, and before or after many other activities. Praying daily. Observing Shabbat. These and other practices are not reserved for orthodox Jews, either. In some form, they are part of the lives of many liberal Jews, and we are encouraged—obligated, in fact—to incorporate those that are meaningful to us in our lives in forms that are meaningful to us.

There is a book by Dan Ariely about deception, called The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. Basically, he writes, everyone lies, and everyone cheats to one extent or another. He set out to find out how much people cheat, in what circumstances, and how cheating can be reduced. One interesting finding is that when people are asked to read the 10 Commandments immediately before doing the activity where they will be tempted to cheat, there is less cheating. Reminding ourselves of our moral and ethical code helps.

Of course, no matter how good your sin or weed maintenance is, they’re still going to get in there. We all will still make mistakes; we will never run out of things to atone for.

So here we are, searching our souls for what we have done or said or left undone or unsaid, that caused pain to someone else or to ourselves, and that distanced us from God or other people. This is our opportunity to devote time to our souls, to think about what amends we could make or what atonement we could do so that we can clear our souls of our wrongdoings, and start fresh.

I spent a couple of hours working in my actual back yard, and I’m here to tell you that while there is still work to be done, there is now room for a sukkah.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur don’t exist so that we can beat ourselves up, but so that we can work hard to clear the back yards of our souls and make room to throw ourselves into the joy and celebration of Sukkot and Simchat Torah.

May our soul-searching be productive, may we be strong as we face our deeds of the past year, and may we find ways to atone so that we may forgive others and ourselves, and be forgiven. Amen and L’Shanah Tovah.

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[1] As told on http://www.jewfaq.org/speech.htm