1. L’shana Tova U’metuka – I wish everyone a good and sweet New Year.

2. I want to begin by welcoming everyone home. We come from many different places but here we are all home. We may have last been in a synagogue yesterday, last Shabbat, last month, at the end of last season or perhaps we have not been in a synagogue since last year. But I welcome everyone. I welcome those who may be coming to synagogue for the first time in many years. I welcome those of you who are young, and those who are old and all those of ages in between. I welcome those who will be here only three days and those who will join us only for three hours.  I welcome you to synagogue if you have doubts about why you are here, about why you should pray and if you have doubts about God. I welcome to synagogue today both saints and sinners, both scholars and novices and even those who are not sure why they are here but their presence in shul today makes someone they love happy. Look around you. The people sitting next to you, behind you, in front of you, are not really all that different from you. So take a moment to say hello and since we will be together for these holidays, introduce yourself and your family so that for these days we can all be sitting with friends.

3. I want to begin with a story, one of my favorite stories, of a man named Itzik who lived in Cracow. One night he had a dream, a castle, a river and a bridge. The voice said to him: “Itzik, the river is the Danube, the castle is in Budapest and under the bridge is a treasure that is waiting for you….. (Tell story)

4. The reason I like to tell this story is because it has a moral, a teaching that we learn from Itzik and his dreams. The moral of the story is: The treasure is in Cracow but knowledge of the treasure is in Budapest.”  Sometimes, in order to know the treasure that we have, we have to travel far and wide to realize its value and to appreciate its place in our life.

5. I am guessing that our experience of the High Holy Days is probably off to a rocky start. From the moment we arrived, took our seats and picked up the Machzor, we probably started wondering, “What we are doing here?” This book, this Machzor, for most of us, is very strange. The prayers it contains are long and complicated and often it is not clear what these prayers are trying to say. Even if we have come to shul all our lives, this service would still be filled with words that are unfamiliar and prayers that are difficult to understand. Rosh Hashana is not just another service at the synagogue. It is a pageant, a performance and a ritual that places each of us as the central character and the prayers we recite call to each of us in unique and different ways.

6.  But, for the experienced davener and the novice alike, this prayer book, this Machzor, is filled with much that instills within us feelings that are not always so pleasant. Some of us may be confused by the long Hebrew passages that are between familiar prayers. Some of us may be angry at the rampant sexism and nationalism that fills these pages. Some of us may be doubtful that a God who seems to depend so much on praise might have some kind of an influence in our lives, and some may find the words of prayers downright disturbing, and we may wonder, “if there is a God that could do all these terrible things, then why would I want to pray to that God?”

7. So a few comments as I begin. First of all, we are not the first Jews in history to have these problems; some of these prayers have been the source for many questions and concerns over hundreds of years. For a time, Jews were afraid to ask the difficult questions about prayer and they were afraid to change the Machzor since the prayers within the book seemed so old and were considered to be an inheritance from our ancestors. But Jews of old were not so different from us Jews who live in the here and now. We ask the same question, if our ancestors could find meaning in these old prayers, why are these prayers so difficult for us?

8. Rabbi Morris Silverman, and the committee that authored our Machzor, had to make many difficult decisions. The minutes of their meetings tell us that most of the time the committee opted to keep the prayers in their original Hebrew but changed the translations so that they would be more palatable for modern Jews. The first edition of this book was published in the 1940’s, before we understood the horror of the Holocaust and before we experienced the establishment of the State of Israel. It was reprinted in 1951, a world in which genders were carefully defined, divorce was still a shanda and nobody dared to talk about child abuse, civil rights and religious freedom. The great fear was atomic war, not terrorism or rogue states.

9. But all the style and historical issues aside, we come to shul and we want to pray. But these High Holy Day prayers in the Machzor seem so problematic. Even the most iconic prayers for Rosh Hashana, make us at best, a bit queasy, and at most, very uncomfortable with what the prayers say and how they say them. Some of us have been saying these prayers for so many years that we really don’t look at them anymore. But it is not enough to chant the words we pray, they are supposed to become engraved in our hearts. When we take a good hard look at these prayers, we find ourselves starting to become unsure about if we want these words so engraved.

10. There are many examples. We can start with the Unetane Tokef which we will recite in just a few more minutes. Our Musaf service today and tomorrow features a prayer teaching us that on these days, God decides who shall live and who shall die. Is this decision really set at the beginning of the year? For the rest of the year are we just playing out the fate that has been determined over the next ten days? And then it tells us that Teshuva, Tzedaka and Tephilla can avert God’s severe decree. Does this mean that if tragedy and sorrow visit our homes, that we did not pray enough? We didn’t repent enough? We didn’t give enough to Tzedaka?

11. One of my colleagues had these issues rise right to the front of his mind one Rosh Hashana as he looked out at his congregation and saw an 11 year old girl, sitting near the front, whose mother was dying of metatastic breast cancer. What does this little girl experience when she recites this prayer? Will she go home thinking that all the efforts of doctors and family will be of no avail, that her mother’s fate has already been determined? And when her mother died the next week what did that little girl think? Did she learn from Unetane Tokef that perhaps she didn’t pray hard enough? Perhaps she was not sincere in her repentance? Perhaps she should have given more Tzedaka?  Unetane Tokef is one of the central prayers in our Machzor. How do we answer this little girl’s questions and how do we answer our own questions?

12. Take a look at Avinu Malkeynu. Do we really envision God as a king, sitting on a throne up in heaven? Is God that old man in heaven deciding who will be granted pardon or not? Sometimes I think we look at God as some kind of a divine Santa Claus, whose job it is to grant the wishes on our list. The list of prayers that make up Avinu Malkeynu imply that God is arbitrary with God’s bounty. And then, who elected God to be the King of the Universe? Shouldn’t God be like a President rather then a King? And what is this about God being male? What if God is female? Or if God has no gender at all? Why is this prayer so medieval and so sexist?

13. On Yom Kippur we will recite the Al Het, the list of 44 sins for which we repent. But what if we didn’t do all these sins? Why should I feel guilty about the sins of other people? What is this guilt thing that the Machzor wants to place upon me and that I have to literally beat myself up over things I don’t think I have ever been guilty of?

14. And finally, there is Kol Nidre. The prayer that people come from high and low to hear. Hearing the Hazan sing the words can bring us to tears. We really want it to mean something, but the words read more like a contract then a prayer. Does this prayer get us off the hook for promises that we have made, or promises that we will make in the year ahead? Does this prayer imply that Jews don’t keep their promises? Whatever it may have meant to Jews living in Spain and Turkey, what meaning is it supposed to have for us, that we should gather by the thousands to hear Kol Nidre chanted each year?

15. When we sit in our seats and open our Machzor, we find ourselves standing at the gates of prayer. What we find before us, as we enter the gate  – we find that we are confronted with a maze. We try to navigate the maze but all too soon, we find ourselves lost, alone and maybe angry. Where are the directions, where are we supposed to go, when are we supposed to stand and when do we sit? What page number are we on? Where do we buy a Machzor GPS to help us navigate through the maze?

16. When we look in the Machzor and we say we are lost, we are not referring to the television show that ended last season. Although for some of us, prayer leaves us as confused as the famous last episode of LOST.  If we are to find our way, we first have to ask, “What do we usually do when we feel lost? What do we usually do to find our way home?”

17. There are several options. We might try to return to the last place where we were sure of our location. That strategy does not work so well in the spiritual world. We cannot grow if we keep going back to the place we feel secure and comfortable. Growth is only possible when we move forward. Another strategy to use if we are lost could be to just sit down and wait for someone to find us. This strategy, however, also does not work in the world of prayer; it is possible to wait all of our lives and still not be sure of which way to go in prayer.

18. When we are lost in prayer, the best  thing that we can do is to continue to explore the uncharted territory around us. There will be lots of things that are unfamiliar and perhaps we will make some mistakes along the way, but eventually, if we don’t give up, we can find ourselves at home in a new world, a world that gives us a deeper understanding of who we are and where we want to go in life.  Instead of feeling lost, we should see our time in the Machzor as an adventure and use that time to explore the uncharted wilderness, and discover for ourselves what prayer has to teach us.

19.  What happens when we feel alone in the maze of prayer? We are, after all, Americans. We are trained from an early age to be loners. We idolize John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone and maybe Kevin Costner. If we are to make our way through life, and through prayer, we feel like we want to do it all by ourselves. All we should need to find our way should be talent and ingenuity. These should help us  to get through whatever life throws our way. Judaism, however, sees life differently. We live in a community. We pray with a minyan. What is good for the community, Judaism tells us, is good for our self. Selfishness is not a part of our faith.

20. Judaism understands that there are many different ways to pray and our religion does not require us to offer only verbal prayer. When the great modern philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel walked with Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in Selma, Alabama, he said of that day that he felt like he was praying with his feet.  When people run to help others, when they comfort the mourners and visit the sick, when they go out of their way to help a neighbor and they take someone who does not drive to the doctor, to the grocery store and to synagogue. These are people who pray with their feet.

21. And there are many other ways that Judaism allows us to pray. When we give money to those in need, when we give clothing to the poor, or even if we don’t have something to give, if we “only” give our friendship and our support, we are praying with our hands. When we lend someone who is unsure on their feet, our arms in support, or when we feed someone who can no longer feed themselves, our hands become our prayer.

22. And when we speak up for Israel or when we protest against hatred and bigotry, when we object to injustice and demand civil rights, when we inspire others to share their ideas to help make the world a better place for everyone, this is how we pray with our minds and our ideas.  Over the course of a year, over the course of a lifetime, Every Jew prays in a way that is unique and right for whatever the situation may be.  At different times in our life we will discover that sometimes we will pray with words, sometimes we will pray with our feet,  sometimes we will pray with our hands and sometimes we will need speak to God through our ideas. As long as we can share our prayers, we will never be alone

23. What if the maze of prayer makes us angry, what should we do? Again, we ask ourselves, what do we usually do when we are angry? Do we yell, complain or throw things around? I guess you can do all those things but I don’t think that they will change the world or our soul very much, throwing things will not help us find our way. Psychologists tell us that when we are angry, we should begin to ask questions, because collecting information helps stop the bad feelings and puts us back in control of our lives.

24. If prayer makes us angry, we need to ask some good questions and make a serious effort to seek the answers. Judaism is centered on study and study is considered a form of prayer. We find in the Talmud the question, “What should one do if one is studying Deuteronomy in the Torah and then suddenly realized that it is time to recite the Shema? Do we need to stop and say the Shema, or does our study of the text count as praying?” The Talmud maintains that study does indeed count as prayer.

25. The late Chancellor of the Seminary, Rabbi Louis Finkelstein used to teach that when he prayed, he talked to God, and when he studied, God spoke to him. We may not always know the right questions to ask and we may not always get an immediate answer, but there is comfort in knowing that we asked good questions. In Judaism, we are taught never to study alone. We are to study in Hevruta, with study partners.  When we share ideas and issues with our partners, only then can we enrich each others learning. And, by the way, there is no law in Judaism that when we are praying, everyone has to be on the same page. What is important when we pray is to encounter our prayers, not keep up with everyone else. When we pray, we don’t have to leave any page until we have contemplated it enough and are ready to move on.

26. In the case of Avinu Malkeynu, The prayer does not have to be sexist. We can look at God, not as our father, but as our parent and we are children of the Divine ruler. Like a parent, perhaps God cannot help us out of all our troubles no matter how much we pray, beg or plead. Perhaps all we can expect from our parents is to hold us when we are afraid and comfort us when we are broken until we are healed. If Avinu Malkenu can do that, then it will have a lasting impact throughout the year.

27. What about Al Het? We may not like the fact that we are made to feel guilty for sins we have not transgressed, but in a Jewish community, we are all responsible for each other. We can’t drill a hole in the bottom of the boat and tell the others with us that they don’t need to pay attention to our actions; after all we are only drilling under our own seat! It may be unfair when someone else sins and our stock portfolio goes down, but if we chose to close our eyes to the abuses around us, we all will suffer the penalties that are the consequences of our refusing to care.

28.  Finally, Kol Nidre has never been about the words. It has always been about the music. Music that has transcended time and location. For centuries we have understood the words to refer not to promises made to other human beings but promises made to God.  Promises to God, however are the most important promises of all, so we should think carefully about what we promise God in our moments of weakness and then, when we do make a promise to God, we should use the commitments we make to sharpen our willpower and strengthen our resolve.

29. We should not be surprised that if we who are here only three days a year find ourselves confused by our Machzor. Only if we are prepared to put some time and effort into our prayers, can we learn to feel better about the words we pray and the about the God whom we address.  Practicing prayer, studying prayer, experiencing prayer will get easier, better and will have more meaning if we perform our spiritual exercises in our synagogue. The Machzor calls us to make this year count. To make it count by growing, each day, in our ability to pray.

30. There is a great story of a Rabbi and a soap-maker taking a walk in the shtetl. The soap-maker says, “I don’t get it Rabbi, The Siddur has been around for hundreds of years and the world is still not a better place than it was before. The Rabbi pointed to a very dirty boy playing in the street. “I don’t get this either, said the Rabbi, how come, after all the soap that is manufactured in the world, this little boy is still so dirty.” The soap-maker replied, “That is not fair, the boy cannot become clean unless he uses the soap.” The rabbi agreed and responded, “and so it is with the siddur, it is only good if people will use it.”

31. In Itzik’s dream, the river is a metaphor for life, the castle represents Torah and the bridge is the synagogue. The treasure of spirituality, of holiness, of prayer, is with us, close at hand, wherever we go and no matter what we may do.  But knowledge of the treasure is found right here in the synagogue. It is found when we dig into the resources of this prayer community. When we gather here to study, when we gather here to pray and when we gather here to celebrate a new year that is beginning. Let us resolve to spend the New Year learning together, sharing life together and helping each other discover the treasure that lies right under our nose. Let us discover God within our souls by visiting our spiritual home, where knowledge of God can always be found.

1. L’shana Tova U’metuka – I wish everyone a good and sweet New Year.

2. I want to begin by welcoming everyone home. We come from many different places but here we are all home. We may have last been in a synagogue yesterday, last Shabbat, last month, at the end of last season or perhaps we have not been in a synagogue since last year. But I welcome everyone. I welcome those who may be coming to synagogue for the first time in many years. I welcome those of you who are young, and those who are old and all those of ages in between. I welcome those who will be here only three days and those who will join us only for three hours.  I welcome you to synagogue if you have doubts about why you are here, about why you should pray and if you have doubts about God. I welcome to synagogue today both saints and sinners, both scholars and novices and even those who are not sure why they are here but their presence in shul today makes someone they love happy. Look around you. The people sitting next to you, behind you, in front of you, are not really all that different from you. So take a moment to say hello and since we will be together for these holidays, introduce yourself and your family so that for these days we can all be sitting with friends.

3. I want to begin with a story, one of my favorite stories, of a man named Itzik who lived in Cracow. One night he had a dream, a castle, a river and a bridge. The voice said to him: “Itzik, the river is the Danube, the castle is in Budapest and under the bridge is a treasure that is waiting for you….. (Tell story)

4. The reason I like to tell this story is because it has a moral, a teaching that we learn from Itzik and his dreams. The moral of the story is: The treasure is in Cracow but knowledge of the treasure is in Budapest.”  Sometimes, in order to know the treasure that we have, we have to travel far and wide to realize its value and to appreciate its place in our life.

5. I am guessing that our experience of the High Holy Days is probably off to a rocky start. From the moment we arrived, took our seats and picked up the Machzor, we probably started wondering, “What we are doing here?” This book, this Machzor, for most of us, is very strange. The prayers it contains are long and complicated and often it is not clear what these prayers are trying to say. Even if we have come to shul all our lives, this service would still be filled with words that are unfamiliar and prayers that are difficult to understand. Rosh Hashana is not just another service at the synagogue. It is a pageant, a performance and a ritual that places each of us as the central character and the prayers we recite call to each of us in unique and different ways.

6.  But, for the experienced davener and the novice alike, this prayer book, this Machzor, is filled with much that instills within us feelings that are not always so pleasant. Some of us may be confused by the long Hebrew passages that are between familiar prayers. Some of us may be angry at the rampant sexism and nationalism that fills these pages. Some of us may be doubtful that a God who seems to depend so much on praise might have some kind of an influence in our lives, and some may find the words of prayers downright disturbing, and we may wonder, “if there is a God that could do all these terrible things, then why would I want to pray to that God?”

7. So a few comments as I begin. First of all, we are not the first Jews in history to have these problems; some of these prayers have been the source for many questions and concerns over hundreds of years. For a time, Jews were afraid to ask the difficult questions about prayer and they were afraid to change the Machzor since the prayers within the book seemed so old and were considered to be an inheritance from our ancestors. But Jews of old were not so different from us Jews who live in the here and now. We ask the same question, if our ancestors could find meaning in these old prayers, why are these prayers so difficult for us?

8. Rabbi Morris Silverman, and the committee that authored our Machzor, had to make many difficult decisions. The minutes of their meetings tell us that most of the time the committee opted to keep the prayers in their original Hebrew but changed the translations so that they would be more palatable for modern Jews. The first edition of this book was published in the 1940’s, before we understood the horror of the Holocaust and before we experienced the establishment of the State of Israel. It was reprinted in 1951, a world in which genders were carefully defined, divorce was still a shanda and nobody dared to talk about child abuse, civil rights and religious freedom. The great fear was atomic war, not terrorism or rogue states.

9. But all the style and historical issues aside, we come to shul and we want to pray. But these High Holy Day prayers in the Machzor seem so problematic. Even the most iconic prayers for Rosh Hashana, make us at best, a bit queasy, and at most, very uncomfortable with what the prayers say and how they say them. Some of us have been saying these prayers for so many years that we really don’t look at them anymore. But it is not enough to chant the words we pray, they are supposed to become engraved in our hearts. When we take a good hard look at these prayers, we find ourselves starting to become unsure about if we want these words so engraved.

10. There are many examples. We can start with the Unetane Tokef which we will recite in just a few more minutes. Our Musaf service today and tomorrow features a prayer teaching us that on these days, God decides who shall live and who shall die. Is this decision really set at the beginning of the year? For the rest of the year are we just playing out the fate that has been determined over the next ten days? And then it tells us that Teshuva, Tzedaka and Tephilla can avert God’s severe decree. Does this mean that if tragedy and sorrow visit our homes, that we did not pray enough? We didn’t repent enough? We didn’t give enough to Tzedaka?

11. One of my colleagues had these issues rise right to the front of his mind one Rosh Hashana as he looked out at his congregation and saw an 11 year old girl, sitting near the front, whose mother was dying of metatastic breast cancer. What does this little girl experience when she recites this prayer? Will she go home thinking that all the efforts of doctors and family will be of no avail, that her mother’s fate has already been determined? And when her mother died the next week what did that little girl think? Did she learn from Unetane Tokef that perhaps she didn’t pray hard enough? Perhaps she was not sincere in her repentance? Perhaps she should have given more Tzedaka?  Unetane Tokef is one of the central prayers in our Machzor. How do we answer this little girl’s questions and how do we answer our own questions?

12. Take a look at Avinu Malkeynu. Do we really envision God as a king, sitting on a throne up in heaven? Is God that old man in heaven deciding who will be granted pardon or not? Sometimes I think we look at God as some kind of a divine Santa Claus, whose job it is to grant the wishes on our list. The list of prayers that make up Avinu Malkeynu imply that God is arbitrary with God’s bounty. And then, who elected God to be the King of the Universe? Shouldn’t God be like a President rather then a King? And what is this about God being male? What if God is female? Or if God has no gender at all? Why is this prayer so medieval and so sexist?

13. On Yom Kippur we will recite the Al Het, the list of 44 sins for which we repent. But what if we didn’t do all these sins? Why should I feel guilty about the sins of other people? What is this guilt thing that the Machzor wants to place upon me and that I have to literally beat myself up over things I don’t think I have ever been guilty of?

14. And finally, there is Kol Nidre. The prayer that people come from high and low to hear. Hearing the Hazan sing the words can bring us to tears. We really want it to mean something, but the words read more like a contract then a prayer. Does this prayer get us off the hook for promises that we have made, or promises that we will make in the year ahead? Does this prayer imply that Jews don’t keep their promises? Whatever it may have meant to Jews living in Spain and Turkey, what meaning is it supposed to have for us, that we should gather by the thousands to hear Kol Nidre chanted each year?

15. When we sit in our seats and open our Machzor, we find ourselves standing at the gates of prayer. What we find before us, as we enter the gate  – we find that we are confronted with a maze. We try to navigate the maze but all too soon, we find ourselves lost, alone and maybe angry. Where are the directions, where are we supposed to go, when are we supposed to stand and when do we sit? What page number are we on? Where do we buy a Machzor GPS to help us navigate through the maze?

16. When we look in the Machzor and we say we are lost, we are not referring to the television show that ended last season. Although for some of us, prayer leaves us as confused as the famous last episode of LOST.  If we are to find our way, we first have to ask, “What do we usually do when we feel lost? What do we usually do to find our way home?”

17. There are several options. We might try to return to the last place where we were sure of our location. That strategy does not work so well in the spiritual world. We cannot grow if we keep going back to the place we feel secure and comfortable. Growth is only possible when we move forward. Another strategy to use if we are lost could be to just sit down and wait for someone to find us. This strategy, however, also does not work in the world of prayer; it is possible to wait all of our lives and still not be sure of which way to go in prayer.

18. When we are lost in prayer, the best  thing that we can do is to continue to explore the uncharted territory around us. There will be lots of things that are unfamiliar and perhaps we will make some mistakes along the way, but eventually, if we don’t give up, we can find ourselves at home in a new world, a world that gives us a deeper understanding of who we are and where we want to go in life.  Instead of feeling lost, we should see our time in the Machzor as an adventure and use that time to explore the uncharted wilderness, and discover for ourselves what prayer has to teach us.

19.  What happens when we feel alone in the maze of prayer? We are, after all, Americans. We are trained from an early age to be loners. We idolize John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone and maybe Kevin Costner. If we are to make our way through life, and through prayer, we feel like we want to do it all by ourselves. All we should need to find our way should be talent and ingenuity. These should help us  to get through whatever life throws our way. Judaism, however, sees life differently. We live in a community. We pray with a minyan. What is good for the community, Judaism tells us, is good for our self. Selfishness is not a part of our faith.

20. Judaism understands that there are many different ways to pray and our religion does not require us to offer only verbal prayer. When the great modern philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel walked with Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in Selma, Alabama, he said of that day that he felt like he was praying with his feet.  When people run to help others, when they comfort the mourners and visit the sick, when they go out of their way to help a neighbor and they take someone who does not drive to the doctor, to the grocery store and to synagogue. These are people who pray with their feet.

21. And there are many other ways that Judaism allows us to pray. When we give money to those in need, when we give clothing to the poor, or even if we don’t have something to give, if we “only” give our friendship and our support, we are praying with our hands. When we lend someone who is unsure on their feet, our arms in support, or when we feed someone who can no longer feed themselves, our hands become our prayer.

22. And when we speak up for Israel or when we protest against hatred and bigotry, when we object to injustice and demand civil rights, when we inspire others to share their ideas to help make the world a better place for everyone, this is how we pray with our minds and our ideas.  Over the course of a year, over the course of a lifetime, Every Jew prays in a way that is unique and right for whatever the situation may be.  At different times in our life we will discover that sometimes we will pray with words, sometimes we will pray with our feet,  sometimes we will pray with our hands and sometimes we will need speak to God through our ideas. As long as we can share our prayers, we will never be alone

23. What if the maze of prayer makes us angry, what should we do? Again, we ask ourselves, what do we usually do when we are angry? Do we yell, complain or throw things around? I guess you can do all those things but I don’t think that they will change the world or our soul very much, throwing things will not help us find our way. Psychologists tell us that when we are angry, we should begin to ask questions, because collecting information helps stop the bad feelings and puts us back in control of our lives.

24. If prayer makes us angry, we need to ask some good questions and make a serious effort to seek the answers. Judaism is centered on study and study is considered a form of prayer. We find in the Talmud the question, “What should one do if one is studying Deuteronomy in the Torah and then suddenly realized that it is time to recite the Shema? Do we need to stop and say the Shema, or does our study of the text count as praying?” The Talmud maintains that study does indeed count as prayer.

25. The late Chancellor of the Seminary, Rabbi Louis Finkelstein used to teach that when he prayed, he talked to God, and when he studied, God spoke to him. We may not always know the right questions to ask and we may not always get an immediate answer, but there is comfort in knowing that we asked good questions. In Judaism, we are taught never to study alone. We are to study in Hevruta, with study partners.  When we share ideas and issues with our partners, only then can we enrich each others learning. And, by the way, there is no law in Judaism that when we are praying, everyone has to be on the same page. What is important when we pray is to encounter our prayers, not keep up with everyone else. When we pray, we don’t have to leave any page until we have contemplated it enough and are ready to move on.

26. In the case of Avinu Malkeynu, The prayer does not have to be sexist. We can look at God, not as our father, but as our parent and we are children of the Divine ruler. Like a parent, perhaps God cannot help us out of all our troubles no matter how much we pray, beg or plead. Perhaps all we can expect from our parents is to hold us when we are afraid and comfort us when we are broken until we are healed. If Avinu Malkenu can do that, then it will have a lasting impact throughout the year.

27. What about Al Het? We may not like the fact that we are made to feel guilty for sins we have not transgressed, but in a Jewish community, we are all responsible for each other. We can’t drill a hole in the bottom of the boat and tell the others with us that they don’t need to pay attention to our actions; after all we are only drilling under our own seat! It may be unfair when someone else sins and our stock portfolio goes down, but if we chose to close our eyes to the abuses around us, we all will suffer the penalties that are the consequences of our refusing to care.

28.  Finally, Kol Nidre has never been about the words. It has always been about the music. Music that has transcended time and location. For centuries we have understood the words to refer not to promises made to other human beings but promises made to God.  Promises to God, however are the most important promises of all, so we should think carefully about what we promise God in our moments of weakness and then, when we do make a promise to God, we should use the commitments we make to sharpen our willpower and strengthen our resolve.

29. We should not be surprised that if we who are here only three days a year find ourselves confused by our Machzor. Only if we are prepared to put some time and effort into our prayers, can we learn to feel better about the words we pray and the about the God whom we address.  Practicing prayer, studying prayer, experiencing prayer will get easier, better and will have more meaning if we perform our spiritual exercises in our synagogue. The Machzor calls us to make this year count. To make it count by growing, each day, in our ability to pray.

30. There is a great story of a Rabbi and a soap-maker taking a walk in the shtetl. The soap-maker says, “I don’t get it Rabbi, The Siddur has been around for hundreds of years and the world is still not a better place than it was before. The Rabbi pointed to a very dirty boy playing in the street. “I don’t get this either, said the Rabbi, how come, after all the soap that is manufactured in the world, this little boy is still so dirty.” The soap-maker replied, “That is not fair, the boy cannot become clean unless he uses the soap.” The rabbi agreed and responded, “and so it is with the siddur, it is only good if people will use it.”

31. In Itzik’s dream, the river is a metaphor for life, the castle represents Torah and the bridge is the synagogue. The treasure of spirituality, of holiness, of prayer, is with us, close at hand, wherever we go and no matter what we may do.  But knowledge of the treasure is found right here in the synagogue. It is found when we dig into the resources of this prayer community. When we gather here to study, when we gather here to pray and when we gather here to celebrate a new year that is beginning. Let us resolve to spend the New Year learning together, sharing life together and helping each other discover the treasure that lies right under our nose. Let us discover God within our souls by visiting our spiritual home, where knowledge of God can always be found.

1. SHABBAT SHALOM

2. Blessings and Curses. This is the content of much of this week’s Parsha. There is a list of blessings if we follow God’s law, and a list of curses for committing sins in secret in the vain hope that we will never be caught. This is followed by a list of good things that will happen if we are faithful to God and a list of disasters if we ignore the teachings of the Torah.

3. There are a number of ways to look at these admonitions. There are a number of ways to deal with the problems that they engender. The first problem is that we know the passage is not true. Our experience tells us that sometimes those who are deserving of blessings don’t get the blessings that are promised. Sometimes those who are deserving of punishment don’t get the curses that are promised. In some ways we have to read this whole difficult passage and sigh, wishing that it were true, that the good would be rewarded and evil will be punished. And we pray that somewhere, in the world to come, this inequality will be made right.

4. In ancient times, when the first and second Temples were destroyed, the people turned to these admonitions and declared that it was not that their enemies had defeated them. The defeat was because God did not fight for them. God did not fight for them because they no longer were true to the teachings of Torah. It was not the strength of the enemy, but the guilt of the people that brought about tragedy and they could only hope that if they became more attached to the Mitzvot of the Torah, they would merit blessings and eventually, the restoration of the Temple and homeland. We repeat this message on holidays when we recite in our Musaf service, “Mip’nai Hatotaynu Galinu MeArtzenu, “because of our Sins we were exiled from our land.” For our ancestors in medieval Europe, and those who lived during the emancipation, these words reminded them that their actions do count in the halls of heaven. But we who live in the shadow of the Holocaust, we understand that there are no sins so terrible that such a tragedy should befall our people. That our sins could never be as bad as to warrant the death of six million innocent Jews, including one million children. There are some theologians who say we should change the words of the Musaf rather than repeat what amounts to blasphemy. There is no sin that could bring on such pain and there is no blessing that could ever comfort us for what we have lost.

5. Rabbi Abigail Trau, a teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary, calls our attention to the fact that God tells us in this Parsha, that if we will LISTEN to what God tells us, all will be well and if we refuse to LISTEN, then death and tragedy will follow. She remembered a rabbi who once taught her by explaining that, unlike our eyes and mouth, our ears are always open. We cannot close our ears to the sounds around us. So it is therefore up to us, in our inner lives, to decide HOW to listen.

6. According to Rabbi Trau, the condition of our emotional state is about what takes place “inside” us no matter the conditions and happenings of our physical lives “outside”. We can’t control what happens to us but we have control over our happiness. We can walk through life with our hearing attuned to the negative or we can devote our hearing to things that are Godly.

7. This is an important lesson to remember at this season of the year, when we begin to examine our souls in preparation for the High Holy Days. This is a time of Heshbone HaNefesh, the taking of a personal inventory of what has happened in the past year and what we need to do to get back to being right with our friends, our neighbors and with God. Over the course of the days and weeks ahead, we will review all the sins we have committed and will strike our chest in contrition for the wrongs we have done. The list of Al Het that we will recite over and over again on Yom Kippur, pierces our hearts as we realize we could have done better last year, and we failed. This season is a sobering reminder that we are far from perfect and far from walking the path laid out for us by God.

8. This review of the last year can be really depressing. Last year we promised ourselves and God that we would do better, and now, at the end of the year, we find that we are as far away from our goal today as we were last Yom Kippur, if not farther away. All the efforts to repent our sins and live a better life just didn’t work out the way we wanted them to, and we feel guilty, and deserving of at least some of the curses that fill the greater part of our Parsha.

9. I have an exercise that I like to do with those who feel that there is no end to the mistakes and sins that they have performed over the course of the year. I hold up a large white sheet of paper with a small black dot in the middle and ask, “What do you see?” Almost everyone replies, “I see a black dot”. I tell them that the dot is insignificant, what this is, is a perfectly good piece of white paper. For most people, the one small dot makes the whole sheet of paper unusable. We need to concentrate sometimes, not on the flaws, but on the greater part of life that is untouched by sin.

10. I don’t want a show of hands, but think about this for a moment. How many of us can say that we broke even one of the Ten Commandments this year? Did we worship graven images? Did we not honor our parents? Did we commit murder or adultery? Did we lie, steal or covet? Maybe we could have honored Shabbat more, but did we at least come to shul, bless Shabbat candles or eat a Shabbat meal? But even if you don’t feel that you observed Shabbat enough to get credit for the Mitzvah, that still leaves you with a 90% success rate for the Ten Commandments. The greatest baseball players are only successful 33% of the time!

11. The prayer, Al Het, lists some forty-four sins that we need to repent on Yom Kippur. But if you read the list, how many can we really say we are personally guilty of transgressing. Five or ten? That still gives us a seventy five percent success rate for the past year. (Aren’t statistics wonderful?) While it is important for our growth to work on making the number of sins in our life as small as possible, we should at least acknowledge that our lives are not totally wicked. We have come a long way in life, and that path has not been wasted just because we are not yet perfect.

12. In fact, the only perfection in this imperfect world is God. No matter how perfect we wish to be, we will never find the ultimate perfection that we find in our Creator. God knows we are not perfect, God knows that while we mean well, we often fall short of the standards that God sets for us and that we set for ourselves. This is why God is so forgiving; the issue is not whether or not we are perfect, the issue is how hard we are trying to be better.

13. There is a famous story about a woman walking on the beach after a storm. She sees a man in the distance and she can’t quite make out what he is doing. As she gets closer, she sees that he is throwing something into the ocean. As she gets even closer, she sees that he is picking up the starfish that have washed ashore in the storm and is throwing them back into the sea. She approaches him and asks, “What are you doing?” He replies, “These starfish will die if they are out of the water too long so I am throwing them back into the sea.” The woman was astounded, “”But don’t you realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!” The man then picked up another starfish and threw it back into the sea, “It makes a difference to that one!”

14. Every action in our lives makes a difference. To a friend, to a neighbor, to a stranger and to God. Every effort we make is important. Every time we fail, we get another chance to learn from our mistakes and try harder or try something different the next time around. As long as we try, we are blessed with opportunities to try again. When we stop trying and give up, only then do we have to face the curses and warnings that are so much a part of this week’s Parsha.

15. Remember also what Rabbi Trau taught, that what is important is not what is outside but how we feel on the inside. We can experience many difficulties in life. What is important is not what happens, but how we feel about them. We can focus on where we failed, or we can focus on what we did right. We can bemoan the fact that we did not do a perfect job, or we can be happy from whatever good we have brought into the world.

16. We will never feed all those who are hungry. We will never visit everyone who is sick. We will never be able to give enough clothing to the poor or find housing for all the homeless. But we can lend a hand to someone who has fallen. We can cheer up one person who is feeling down. We can put a sandwich into the hand of someone who is hungry and we can give respect to someone who is feeling alone. What difference will our small gesture make in the grand scheme of the world? It doesn’t matter, it will make a difference to the ones we help.

17. So take some time over the next few weeks and consider, not how far you have to go but how far you have already come. Stop looking at the dot on the page of your life, the imperfection that stands out so clearly and see all the white space, the good that you have been able to do. Take a look not only where you sinned, but look also at the many places you actually performed Mitzvot. That should be all the blessing you will need to get started on making your improvements for the year ahead.

18. True happiness is not in having never failed, having never sinned; happiness is knowing that every day, in many ways, large and small, we are getting better and better at living a holy life.

May God help us improve in the year ahead, and may God bless us for all the good in our lives, as we say …

AMEN AND SHABBAT SHALOM

Shabbat Shalom

The story out of Israel last week was the arrest of two Rabbis from a religious settlement on the West Bank who had written a book in which they made a Halachic ruling, a ruling of Jewish Law, that it is permitted to kill a non-Jew. It was not permitted to perform random acts of murder but, according to the article in Israel’s newspaper, Haaretz, “According to Shapira, (one of the rabbis arrested) it is permissible to kill a non-Jew who threatens Israel even if the person is classified as a Righteous Gentile. His book says that any gentile who supports war against Israel can also be killed.” This is the “Torah” they published in their book.

These two rabbis, teachers at the “Od Yosef Hai yeshiva, have a long history of inciting Jews to kill Arabs. One was recently arrested as part of an investigation into the burning of a Mosque in a nearby village. The Rabbis of the Od Yosef Hai yeshiva have long been in favor of scrapping the government of Israel and replacing it with a religious monarchy. In fact, two other rabbis were also ordered to appear before the police who are investigating this case and they refused to appear saying that they do not accept the jurisdiction of the police in this matter as Haaretz reported, “In a written statement that aired on Channel 2 …, (Rabbis) Lior and Yosef wrote: “The investigation is contrary to the laws of the Torah – therefore we will not take part in it.”

Let me first make one thing crystal clear. It is forbidden for a Jew to kill anyone, Jew or non-Jew at any time or for any reason. The only exception is if someone, Jew or non-Jew were to physically attack you, you can defend yourself and stop the attack and if the attacker should die from your defense, you are not guilty of murder.

I have not read Rabbi Shapira’s book, but I am reasonably sure that he is ruling that this kind of self defense can be expanded to include all who speak in a disparaging voice against Israel. And I am also reasonably sure that he does not extend that permission to kill Jews who speak against Israel. Rabbis who hold positions such as these often make a distinction between Jews and non-Jews.

We learned in last week’s parsha that when waging war, one can kill the male population of a city that you are at war with. One cannot kill women and children, or even cut down the trees that surround the city. If the city surrenders without a battle, then nobody in the city can be killed when they surrender. Shoftim then goes on to say however, that the Canaanites who are living in the land must be exterminated; men, women and children lest they ensnare Israel with their worship of false gods. We who live in the shadow of the Holocaust, where we the Jews, were victims of such a campaign of extermination, have a hard time seeing our ancestors waging a similar war of extermination against others. The later books of the Bible record that this extermination was never really performed and the issue of Israel being enticed into the paganism of the Canaanites was an ongoing problem until the Philistines arrived on the scene and became a much greater threat to the people of Israel.

So where does this murderous hatred of non-Jews come from? If Jewish law is clear that a human being cannot be killed without a trial and a conviction, why are there so many Jews who think that these rules only apply to Jews, and that all of Jewish Law, from business law to murder, does not apply if the victim is not a member of our faith? Why do we have this ever present hatred of Christians and Muslims that seems to go against the lessons of the Book of Genesis and against most of Rabbinic Law? Clearly one God created us all. Clearly we are all brothers, descended from the first human being, Adam. In parshat Noach, we learn that there are some laws of basic decency that are incumbent upon both Jews and non-Jews. One of these so called, “seven commandments of Noah” teach that it is forbidden to murder anyone, and that there must be fair and impartial judges in a community. Only God is permitted to shed human blood.

Much of the hatred that Jews have to non-Jews comes from centuries of oppression by the majority religions in Europe and the Middle East. Christianity and Islam were both very hard on the Jews who lived among them. In Europe, sometimes we were promised protection but when we were attacked, the protection never came. Sometimes we were victims of political systems looking for a scapegoat to divert attention from the depravity and injustice of the current administration. Sometimes religious leaders incited hatred for Jews to establish Christian leadership credentials or to promote obedience from the members of the church. Islamic countries were not often better. At first Jews were accepted as a brother religion of monotheism and not included in Islam’s hatred of all that was pagan. But as time went by, Jews were persecuted and killed over their refusal to adopt the Islamic faith. A golden age of Judaism in Islamic countries was all too soon followed by a time of persecution and expulsion that devastated the Jewish communities of the Middle East.

Modern times have brought about many changes in the world. The Catholic church pronounced almost 50 years ago that Jews should not be persecuted, that Judaism was a sister religion and that anti-Semitism was a sin. Virtually all Christian denominations forbid discrimination and persecution because of one’s faith, including Judaism, and while the evangelical denominations would still like nothing more then to convert Jews to Christianity, many of them stand together with us in supporting Israel. Believe it or not, there are a vast majority of Muslims around the world who do not hate Jews at all and do not preach the destruction of Israel. For example, do you know which country has the largest Muslim population in the world? That’s right, Indonesia. A nation that does not regularly preach the destruction of Israel. In fact there are quite a few states with large Muslim populations that actually have diplomatic relations with Israel, including Egypt and Jordan.

The problem with Rabbi Shapira and others who make their pronouncements against non-Jews is that they are the purveyors of what has become a nasty kind of bigotry. That it is okay today to do to “them” what “they” once used to do to us. Now that we have our own state, and an army to back us up, we don’t have to fear non-Jews anymore. We can add back into the Aleynu prayer the passage that Christian authorities banned because it offended Christians. It still offends Christians, and we have lived without the verse for hundreds of years but for some who are still angry over that one act of censorship, for them it is time we rubbed back in their face that they don’t run our lives anymore.

It would all be rather silly if it were not for Rabbi Shapria and the Rabbis of Od Yosef Hai who agree with his Halachic opinion as explained in his book. Non-Jews do not have civil rights in the eyes of these Rabbis. Non-Jews do not deserve due process of the law, mercy or understanding. We can burn their houses of worship like they used to burn ours. We can kill them at will because they used to kill us for no good reason. It does not matter to the Rabbis of Od Yosef Hai if the criticism of a non-Jew against Israel is valid or not, no matter if the Gentile has good motives or bad: in the minds of these rabbis, the only good Goy is a dead Goy.

This is such a gross distortion of Judaism that I am almost unable to call these men Rabbis. They cloak the same vile hatred that was once used against us in the guise of Jewish Law. There is no such law. There is no such permission in Judaism to burn a mosque, to cheat a Christian or to kill any non-Jew who might speak out against Israel. Rabbis who teach this kind of discrimination not only endanger the entire Jewish People with their Hillul HaShem but they drive more and more Jews away from the faith of their fathers because of teachers like these who preach a religion of bigotry and hatred. Such a religion is not Judaism and I will oppose all who teach otherwise.

And let me turn for a moment to the other discrimination against Moslems that is happening in this country. Somebody wrote to me this week amazed that President Obama and New York Mayor Bloomberg, were so out of touch with the majority of Americans that they supported building a mosque at “ground zero”. First of all, the mosque is blocks away from “ground zero”. But more to the point, it really doesn’t matter if our president and the mayor of New York were out of touch with 100% of all Americans. The law is clear. The government of this country has no right to tell the followers of any religion where they can or cannot build a house of worship. There must be compliance with all proper zoning rules, but the first amendment of the constitution gives all religions the freedom to worship without government interference. That includes Muslims in New York. If today we say they have no right to build their mosque in one place, it will only be a matter of time when someone will be opposed to Jews building a synagogue near someplace else. This site is not even within sight of “ground zero”. Let us not get involved in this kind of nasty discrimination.

There are many kinds of people in the world. Some of them I understand and some live the kinds of lives that make no sense to me. Sometimes people do kind things that make me proud to be a human being. Sometimes they do things that so horrify me that I want to make sure that they do not corrupt all of society. But civil rights are just that, civil rights. Every person, whether I agree with them or not, is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We are all entitled to a court system that is fair and unbiased. We are all entitled to free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from want. We are all entitled to make an honest living, have equal pay for equal work and equal benefits of society. If Israel wants to call herself a democratic country, then those who advocate the murder of others, even if the speakers are rabbis, they deserve to be arrested and tried by a court for criminal incitement. Those who insist on discriminating against others will soon find that others will feel free to discriminate against them. If bigotry is a sin, then it is a sin for everyone, no matter their race, gender, sexual orientation or religion.

Before any of us take a stand on matters of discrimination, let us always first consider how we would feel if we were the ones being discriminated against. There are still plenty of ethical issues to discuss, but let us not deny civil rights to any human being. Not too long ago, Nazis considered Jews to be vermin, and used a potent insecticide to exterminate six million of our people. Let us make sure that we are never accused of doing the same to someone else.

May God bless us with compassion and understanding for all people all over the world and may our lives be filled with acts of kindness and care for Jews and non-Jews alike as we say…

AMEN AND SHABBAT SHALOM.

1. Shabbat Shalom

2. Our Parsha begins with a very famous verse. “See, I set before you this day blessing and curse; blessing if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced.”

3. Clearly, we have an obligation to follow the laws of the Torah. The entire purpose of the Torah is to teach us what God expects of us and what exactly we each need to do in order to live a righteous and pious life. It is not a law that is supposed to be a burden to us, rather the law is supposed to help us create a better world. But as we have seen over the past weeks, trying to understand what God and the Torah expect from us is not easy.

4. We have seen over the past two weeks, Conservative Judaism teaches us that the laws of the Torah have to be able to change in order for the laws to still be a living part of our life. The laws of the Torah have to be open to new interpretations and sometimes they need to be extended; other times they need to be limited in how they affect our lives. We have seen how the laws of the Torah are extended to include women as active participants in Jewish life. We have seen how Jewish law was restricted so that we would not have to deal with laws relating to sacrifices and the hereditary priesthood. Last week we noted that God speaks to us every day, extending the words of Torah through a deeper understanding of how we should apply the law. The Torah was not given just one time, long ago at Sinai. It is given to each of us every day, and we need to pay attention to the direction it is taking us as we struggle to find our way in this modern world using our ancient faith.

5. This Shabbat we will answer a third question. If the law is not fixed for all time and the word of God is heard in every generation, what is it that we, as Conservative Jews are supposed to do? How are we supposed to know how to live a Jewish life, especially since it all seems so fluid all the time? If we want blessings and if we want to avoid the curse that is mentioned in our Parsha this week, we need to know what is expected in the life of a Conservative Jew.

6. Since we don’t follow what is written blindly, it is hard to explain how being a Conservative Jew is supposed to work. If we take a look at our members, we can see that there is a very, very wide range of practice that can be found in our movement. Just looking around this congregation we are aware that there are some here who do not accept a changing role for women in the service. We can also observe that there are some women who have decided to wear a tallit in prayer. Some of us keep kosher homes, some of us eat only kosher food outside our homes, some of us don’t require all of our food to have kosher supervision and some of us don’t seem to care at all about what we can and cannot eat. So where do we come together? Where does this wide range of observance take us as we look to define what being a Conservative Jew is all about?

7. Unlike Orthodox and Reform Jews, we are not defined merely by our practice. Our movement is pluralistic, which means we accept Jews wherever they may be on the spectrum of observance. We don’t want to chase anyone away from finding a path to God. We certainly don’t want to ridicule anyone who finds comfort and meaning in Jewish ritual and observance. There are many reasons that people increase or decrease the level of their observance. The Masorti way is to give everyone the space to find their own way. So what is our philosophy of Jewish practice? What do we teach our members about living an observant life?

8. The first thing we desire in Conservative Judaism is that each Jew be a willing participant. Judaism today will not work very well if our members join us kicking and screaming that they don’t want to be here. Someone who does not care about Judaism, Torah or God just will not make a good Conservative Jew. This is not to say that one has to like everything about Judaism, but we have to be positive that Judaism is the right path for our life. We have to believe that Jewish prayer is our preferred way to express our spirituality; that Jewish law has something to say about how we live our lives; and that Jewish morality is the base upon which we want to build the relationships that matter in our life.

9. Nothing that is Jewish should be foreign or alien to someone who is a part of our movement. The first place we go when we have questions is to see what our tradition has to say about them. When we are planning our lives, we should do so around Shabbat and Jewish holidays. No matter what the issue may be, a Conservative Jew must first turn to our tradition as the baseline for how he or she should respond to the matter at hand. But being willing is not just about decisions about living life; it includes surrounding ourselves with Jewish music, art and culture.

10. This leads us to the second thing we teach: a Conservative Jew must be learning. I have guided a large number of people who were looking to convert to Judaism for all kinds of reasons. I make sure to let them know that if they want to learn everything there is to know about Judaism, then they should realize that it will take 80 or so YEARS to acquire all that knowledge. I tell them that so I will not scare them off. We who have grown up Jewish know that it could take many lifetimes to acquire all one needs to know. Therefore, we need to be constantly learning what Torah has to teach us; how the Rabbis and Sages have interpreted the laws of Torah in every generation; how the law can be applied in situations that affect our lives and the extended life of all those in our community.

11. Listening to your Rabbi’s sermon is one way of learning. Reading books from the library or buying them from the Judaica section of Barnes and Noble is another way. The classic form of learning in Judaism is sitting in a classroom and discussing the issues with a teacher and with classmates. In the discussions themselves we can often find the word of God. I know that there are some of you here who don’t like it at all when I come off the bima to engage in discussion with the congregation. And yet, that is the traditional way to learn, as we struggle together to understand the difficult concepts we have to master. Once we understand the concepts, it is easier to make the choices about how we will live our lives.

12. If we are really willing to make Jewish values the foundation of our life, we need to be learning so we know how Judaism can strengthen that foundation. This is not to say that Judaism has all the answers for the problems of life, but our faith remains a place we can turn to first to see how our ancestors responded to the similar situations. Not only should our homes have Jewish art, but to be a learning Jew, we also need to fill our homes with Jewish books.

13. Finally, a Conservative Jew must also be a striving Jew. We do not permit ourselves to say that “I have done enough”. Each day we have to be open to new lessons and then be open to how those lessons can change our life. There are no Jews who have become so pious that they can not improve their lives. Each and every day is an opportunity to learn something new and to try something new. If someone does not keep kosher, perhaps it is time to start just by buying kosher meat. If one does not keep Shabbat, perhaps one can grow by keeping Shabbat for just a few hours, long enough to have a Shabbat dinner, with candles, wine and challah. We don’t have to jump into ritual and mitzvot in their entirety; we only need to strive to do more.

14. One of the great modern Jewish philosophers was Franz Rosenzweig He discovered his Judaism later in his life and slowly grew in his understanding of the faith and in the way he practiced his religion. Sometimes someone would challenge him, asking if he was now observant and practicing all the mitzvot. Rosenzweig always responded, “not yet!” He understood that what was important in Judaism was less about where you ended up and more about how you get there. Rosenzweig was, in this sense, a good Conservative Jew.

15. This clearly constitutes one of the most striking differences between Conservative and Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews see the mitzvot as a recipe in a cookbook. All we need to do is perform the right deeds at the right time in the right order and inevitably, we will end up religious. Just like if you combine eggs, flour, water and a few other ingredients and inevitably you will end up with a cake. Conservative Jews see mitzvot more like a work of art, and that each of us has to paint the picture in our own way. There is no one way to create art; the final product is in the hand of the artist.

16. We now see exactly how our movement places itself in the Jewish world. Rather than accept Halacha blindly or to reject Halacha blindly, we place ourselves in a completely different position. It is not at all about what we observe, it is more about if we are willing to make Judaism the central pillar in our life; if we are learning more every day about the way Judaism can and does color our view of the world, and then strive every day to grow in our learning and in our commitment to living a Jewish life. This is why so many Conservative Jews are in so many different places. What ties us together is the direction we travel in life, the commitment to learn as much as we can along the way and the striving to go a bit further on our Jewish road every day, a road that we believe will help us live a meaningful life and bring us closer every day to God.

May God bless us with a long life so we will willingly learn more as we strive to live better lives… and let us say, Amen

1. Shabbat Shalom

2. Last Shabbat, in response to the crisis in Israel over who is a Jew, we took a look at what it means to be a Conservative/Masorti Jew. After all, if we expect the members of Israel’s Knesset to understand our needs and our commitment to Judaism, Israel and Jewish Law, we need to understand ourselves what we mean when we say, “I am a Conservative Jew!” Last Shabbat I talked about how we look at Jewish Law. I noted that for Jewish Law to be alive, it must be able to change. It has always changed and we just continue that fundamental concept in our Movement. We believe in tradition, but when the law needs to be changed so that it can help us to live better, more meaningful lives, we believe that changing Jewish law is a requirement that we must not ignore.

3. There is another side to our Movement as well. It is not in the practical, day to day observance of Judaism, but more in the philosophic area. Being a Jew has a lot to do with our actions in the world, but being a Jew also must deal with what we believe. What we do must be based on what we believe, and what we believe must play out in what we do. For example, Jews believe in one God, no more, and no less. We do not believe that we are on our own nor do we believe that we are at the mercy of conflicts in the universe between competing gods. This fundamental belief makes possible our commitment to justice. Our belief in one god, makes it possible for us to act with justice in the world.

4. So how are Conservative Jews different from other Jews? The point of difference is not how many gods there are in our faith. The issue is about how that God communicates the Divine will to human beings. Jews consider the Torah as the record of what God has commanded the Jewish people (and what God has commanded other people as well). According to the Torah, the Divine will was communicated to our people when they stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai. The Torah said that God spoke to the people of Israel and to Moses and the result was the contents of our Torah scroll.

5. Modern philosophers tell us that in our time, there are really only two types of Jews. Those who believe that the record in the Torah is literally true, and those who do not. The literalists tell us that we have no right to change one letter, or one vowel of the text of the Torah because it is Divine in origin and it represents the words that our ancestors heard at Sinai. The non-literalists also believe that the Torah is the record of God’s communication with human beings, but that communication did not occur at Mount Sinai. The Torah is the record of all the ways we have heard the words of God over hundreds if not thousands of years. Over time, the record of this communication was edited into the Torah that we read today.

6. It would be easy if we could just prove one way or the other if the Torah is true or not. Unfortunately, there is no proof one way or the other. There are no other accounts of what happened at Sinai or if Sinai even happened at all. One of the weird things about the Torah is the fact that we have no historical evidence of anything in the Bible until after the death of King Solomon. Does this mean that the Torah is not true? Does it mean that it is all fiction? Does it mean that there was no Moses, Abraham or King David? The honest answer is that we just don’t know. Anyone who says one way or the other is taking the matter on faith, not on any historical basis.

7. So does this mean that the Torah is not true? Well, that depends on what you consider to be the truth. Literalists believe that the Torah is not only a true account of what God said to us but that it is historically true as well. But if we think about it, historical accuracy does not change at all the truth of the lessons in the Torah. Abraham’s legacy of faith and hospitality, Moses’ struggle to help us learn how to stop being slaves and start acting like free people all do not depend on historical accuracy. Whether or not our ancestors stood at Sinai does not make the Ten Commandments any less important or compelling.

8. The literalists tell us that if God did not speak to us with clear words at Sinai, then the Torah is just a collection of good ideas that people had and would therefore have no authority to command us on how we should live our lives. Non-literalists believe that the Torah is a Midrash, the master story, as to how our ancestors viewed their relationship to God. It may have been written by human hands, but clearly there is Divinity in every Mitzvah, indeed in every letter. How God communicated with us is an interesting question, but we believe that God did speak to us and the Torah is our story as to how we understand that communication.

9. Last Shabbat we read again, the words of the Ten Commandments. But according to the Torah, how many of them were actually spoken by God? The Torah is not very clear. At first it seems to say that God spoke “all these words”, but later it says that the people first heard God and were very frightened and told Moses that he should listen to God and then tell the people what God said. If you look at the commandments, you see that the first two commandments are written as if God spoke them, but the other eight are written in the “third person” as if they were communicated to the people by Moses. Some sages in the Talmud wrote that all the people heard at Sinai was the first commandment, that the second one was also given to the people by Moses. Actually it is really hard to figure out what the second commandment really is but that is a different lesson for a different day. I have always been intrigued by the lesson of one Hasidic Rabbi who said that perhaps all the people heard at Sinai was the first word, “Anochi” the Divine declaration of self. And then he goes on to say that perhaps all the people heard was just the first letter of the first word of the commandments. What letter is that? “Aleph” and what is the sound of an Aleph? It is the one letter that has no sound!

10. Does that mean our ancestors listened for God’s voice and heard nothing? I don’t think so. Our Tradition tells us that each person at Sinai, and the people who lived before Sinai and all those destined to be born after Sinai, they all heard the voice of God. That each person heard it in their own language and in a way that they could clearly understand it. That at the moment that God spoke, the world was completely silent. Perhaps what they heard, they did not “hear” with their ears. Perhaps they only heard the voice of God through their hearts. Elijah wanted to hear God’s voice and only heard a still small voice. A murmuring sound that perhaps he felt in his heart and which was not audible through his ears. Like I said, the Torah is not very clear on all of this, perhaps because how God speaks, is not the same as the way we speak.

11. Everyone here has been listening to Rabbis preach about the Torah for most of our lives. Does it really make any real difference in the truth of those lessons if the Torah was one original document or a redaction of four different historical documents? We who read many different newspapers and listen to different television programs so that we can put the information together and learn the truth, do we really think that even the Torah was not compiled from the lessons of many people over a long period of time? Rather than discredit the truth of the Torah, these different sources testify to the eternal truths of the Torah that were evident over a long span of time.

12. The difference in belief then colors the way we view the world. God’s teachings were not limited to Sinai, but have spoken to us in every generation including our own generation. When we study Torah and seek to learn the truth in what it has to say, we are participating in an act of revelation as important as the one recorded in the Torah. Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, the former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary summarized this idea when he wrote, “When I pray, I talk to God. When I study, God talks to me.” Revelation is not a record of something that happened long ago, it is an ongoing conversation that we can have with God when we sit down and study the words of Torah.

13. I admit that this way of understanding God and Torah will not work very well if we still consider God to be just like Michelangelo painted him on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. If we think of God as an old man with a long beard sitting on a throne in heaven, then a historical understanding of Torah will not resonate with that theology very well. But we don’t think of God as being far away in Heaven, but a part of our very existence. If we consider God to be close by and caring about who we are and how we live our lives, then we can also understand how the words of Torah can shape our lives even if we cannot prove the historical accuracy of the text.

14. Our non-literal view of the Torah helps us understand God as being a close and personal part of our lives. God is therefore always close at hand, in good times and in bad times. God rejoices with us when we celebrate and cries with us in our hour of sadness and despair. We can always count on God and we live our lives so that God can count on us, to bring justice, mercy, kindness and compassion into the world, just as God commanded us to do in the Torah. This is the essence of our belief and content of the brit, the covenant that we have with our Creator.

15. May everyday bring us closer to God and closer to living a Godly life, not with blind faith in a text, but in the greater faith that comes when we open our minds and hearts to hear God’s voice as it commands us as it commanded our ancestors.

Amen and Shabbat Shalom

1. Shabbat Shalom

2. Last Shabbat I asked our congregation to join with Conservative Jews all over the world to protest the Rotem Conversion bill. Thanks to all of you who sent the Prime Minister an e-mail. By Sunday Netanyahu had received 25,000 emails protesting the vote from Masorti and another 25,000 from the Federation website. By the end of the day, the Prime Minister had spoken up to kill the conversion bill and pledged to work to find a better solution for Russian Jews and for American Jews. There still is much that must be done, and we cannot let our guard down, but for now, the crisis is past.

3. It continues to amaze me that the members of Israel’s K’nesset still don’t understand Conservative Judaism and what we stand for. Our movement is constantly in the Israeli news and we lobby the K’nesset regularly. Other than the fact that the Orthodox factions run political parties, we don’t seem to be able to get very far in letting lawmakers know who we are and what our issues in Israel are.

4. But maybe the problem is less about Israel and more about Conservative Judaism in America. How many of us here today could speak up about what our movement is and what we believe? What would we say, that we are “not Orthodox but not Reform”? That we are “in the middle” of the denominations? How many of us really understand the philosophy and significance of Conservative Judaism?

5. In this week’s Parsha, Moses tells the People of Israel that he has given them a good law, that they should not add to it nor subtract from it, but they should follow all of its teachings. We can easily see why Moses would say this. These words, after all, were given to us by God. Who are we to change the law? What right do we have to amend the Torah? The Torah is filled with examples of disaster when God’s words were not followed. Why should we add or subtract from them to suit our needs?

6. And yet, from the very moment that the Torah became the foundation of law for Judaism, Rabbis have been adding and subtracting to the laws of the Torah. Have you ever been married by a Rabbi? If so, all of the laws of marriage were additions to the Torah. There is no place in the Torah where it tells us how we are supposed to get married. Do you light candles on Shabbat? Shabbat and Festival candles are also not found in the Torah, They too were added later by the Rabbis. There is no place in the Torah that teaches us to pray three times a day, or that the morning service is required. Rosh Hashana is not found in the Torah. Neither is Purim or Hanukah. The format for a Blessing is not from the Torah. There is nothing about funeral services in the Torah. The Torah does not know from second day Yom Tov either. For that matter, the Torah tells us that we must not work on Shabbat, but it never says what its definition of work should be. The laws of working on Shabbat were all added to the law.

7. If you were a trained lawyer, you understand that as soon as a law code is written down, there will need to be changes. Laws have to be interpreted, so people can understand them. As situations change, the law has to change to fit new situations and new circumstances. Sometimes laws have to be amended. Sometimes there needs to be new laws. Sometimes laws must be removed from the books. A law code that does not change will quickly become useless, irrelevant and dead. A living law must be able to change.

8. Everyone knows that the Torah has 613 Mitzvot; 613 laws that make up the core of all that Judaism stands for. There are 248 positive commandments and 365 negative commandments. Or are there? Many of the Mitzvot deal with sacrifices. We don’t sacrifice animals anymore so we don’t pay any attention to these Mitzvot. Some of the Mitzvot have to do with the way Kohanim serve in the Temple. We don’t have a Temple with Kohanim anymore so these Mitzvot no longer are valid. According the Hafetz Hayim, who died in 1933, there are only 77 positive Mitzvot that we follow and 194 negative Mitzvot. In addition there are 26 Mitzvot that only apply to Jews who live in Israel. That leaves us with only 297 Mitzvot. The rest have been removed from the law.

9. Given this understanding of the law, we can better understand what Conservative Judaism is all about. We do not believe that Jewish Law was fixed at any point in time. We do not believe that the Talmud, the Mishna Torah, The Shulchan Aruch nor the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch have fixed Jewish law for all time. The same forces that have always shaped Jewish Law still shape it. Torah and Halacha are like a growing tree. Sometimes there are limbs that die out and fall off, sometimes there are new branches and leaves that grow. It does not change all at once, like the Reform movement tries to do, but it grows organically, building on the roots and branches that have come before.

10. Conservative Judaism also says that there may not be uniformity about how or when the law changes. Different Jews have different opinions (imagine that!) and different Rabbis also do not agree (what a surprise!). Sometimes only time will tell which Rabbi or group of Rabbis were correct. So we rarely make definitive changes in the law. More often, we record the opinion of the Majority and the opinion of the Minority so future generations will see what we have done and can best decide what they should do for their time and circumstances. When a decision is needed, the Rabbi of that place, the Mara D’Atra, is given the duty to examine the laws as they exist and decide what would be the best course for the Jews in that community.

11. The participation of women in Jewish life is one area of change that we understand very well. An examination of the laws relating to the role of women in ritual life shows clearly that it does not reflect the words of Torah; nowhere in the Torah does it limit the role of women in Jewish rituals. Just read about Deborah, Miriam, Hannah and the matriarchs and you can see that they would not recognize the laws of Mechitza, Kol Isha and the prohibition of counting women in the Minyan. We know from our study that the laws relating to women were developed in relation to the realities of ancient societies. When those realities changed, when women started taking a more active role in secular society, there needed to be similar changes in religious law as well. A modern woman who fights discrimination in American society should not have to be told that she should accept discrimination in the religious world.

12. It is important to note that just because some laws have needed to change, it does not mean we have abandoned Halacha altogether. The laws of Kashrut still apply. We still can’t eat lobster or ham. The laws of Shabbat still apply, we still must not write, pay bills or wash the car on Shabbat. We still have to eat Matzah on Pesach, build a Sukkah on Sukkot and fast on Tisha b’Av and Yom Kippur. We still have to be kind to strangers, heal the sick, feed the hungry and clothe those in need. We are still not permitted to murder, commit adultery, lie, steal or covet. We may need to change some laws, but we also have to uphold the rest of the tradition that does not change. Or as one Conservative Rabbi put it. “We can argue if sturgeon or swordfish have scales or not and if they are kosher or not, but that still does not make oysters and clams permitted.”

13. Every change is not a sign of Reform Judaism. Standing by the tradition does not make one Orthodox. There is Tradition and there is Change, and Conservative Jews believe in both. We believe that changes must support the other requirements of the Tradition.

14. Our flexibility allowed us to be Zionists long before Orthodox and Reform Jews accepted Zionism. Our commitment to tradition has enabled us to prevent a major break with world wide Judaism. Our insistence on scholarship has made our Rabbis and universities known all over the world. We strongly oppose religious fundamentalism and we are strong supporters of religious pluralism. We don’t believe that we have the only path to God. We think that religion should not become political, neither in Israel nor in the United States.

15. Conservative Judaism believes that we are the descendants of the Rabbis in every age that molded the laws of the Torah to fit the needs of their generation. There is nothing to be ashamed of in Conservative Judaism. We should bear the title proudly. Those who speak loudest against us are the ones most frightened by the positions we take. We call ourselves Conservative Jews because we are committed to conserving our heritage, and that takes both Tradition and Change.

16. May our Torah always be our Tree of Life, as well as a Living Tree. May God bless us with the wisdom and courage to keep our faith growing and changing as we say…

Amen and Shabbat Shalom