Sermon for Yom Kippur Morning 5787 ~ September 21, 2026

On Yom Kippur, we all pray shoulder to shoulder, equal in the eyes of God, humbly asking for forgiveness before our Creator.  But, we all know how easily our egos can get in the way.

There, of course, is a joke about that:  On Yom Kippur the rabbi falls to his knees, and cries out “oh God’ before you I am nothing!”  Seeing this, the wealthy synagogue president, from his honored place on the bimah, falls to his knees, and cries out “oh god’ before you I am nothing!”  The humble janitor, sweeping in the back, is moved by the spirit. He drops his broom, falls to his knees, and cries out “oh god’ before you I am nothing!”  The synagogue president nudges the rabbi and whispers, “look who thinks he’s nothing!”

This day, Yom Kippur, comes to place a mirror in front of ourselves.  Today we stand together, stripped of our finery, rich and poor, community leader and newcomer, young and old, and we all plead the same case: Forgive our failings, have mercy on us, allow us a place in the Book of Life, even though we are not worthy.  

Contrary to what the joke says, we have infinite worth and we are all capable of immense good.  But, as any human being, we can do great harm.  Our egos, our judgements, our fears, get in the way of us listening to our better angels.  

But can you blame us?  It’s been a tough year. We are living in a time of rising anti-Semitism, rising hatred and extremism, a decline of democracy, increased fear.  Can you blame us for feeling a little self-protective?  We come to synagogue to feel safe, to feel understood.  

And at the same time, these Days of Awe demand unflinching self-examination:  what are our shortcomings? What harm have we done?  How have our biases and fears led us in the wrong direction? In this sacred place, we can courageously admit our vulnerabilities.

But, Rabbi Anna, you might argue, these are not normal times.  There is so much trauma and hate and fear and mistrust. Within our homes, we don’t agree on Israel and it’s so bad, we can’t even talk about it.  But outside our homes, we hear the word Zionism thrown around like a slur. Jews are being called colonizers like some kind of sick joke and then claim it isn’t anti-semitism.  We’ve seen it before; we recognize the same old hate dressed up in new descriptors.  But now, it is coming from the left and the right, leaving many American Jews feeling deeply afraid and alienated.

To be sure, these are dangerous times.  The vacuum of sane, moral leadership is turning people against one another. Where people on one side openly accuse the other side of being “un-American.” More and more people- on both the far right and far left– now support political violence.  Elected officials are not only threatened, but are attacked and harmed, and very little has been done about it. The political commentator David French noted earlier this year that the majority of people in America view their fellow citizens as morally bad. 

As a result, we increasingly surround ourselves with likeminded people, avoiding confrontation, though we lurk on social media to watch strangers dismiss the other side and shout down one another.  In this way we move further apart from one another, further apart from understanding another, further apart from seeing any commonality, being able to relate to each other’s lives, being able to appreciate the humanity in one another.  We are seeing this breakdown in civility play out across the US, in Israel, and across the Jewish world.  

So, sadly, I would say – this is exactly the time to talk about our sins.  As your rabbi, I worry about what the climate of hatred and fear is doing to us.  What is that doing to our hearts, our families, our relationships, our trust, our joy, our faith, nevermind our physical safety. I worry about the fear and grief and isolation that has gripped us, particularly since October 7, 2023, and how it has changed us.  It has changed me too.  

I see how we are so often caught in the middle.  How anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, even victimhood, have become weaponized.  How tempting it would be to shut down, move away.  But where to?  

Staying behind these walls will only lead to further alienation and mistrust. From this place, looking down on others, it is much easier to place blame, denigrate, and dehumanize than it is to put a mirror to ourselves.  And when you come to believe that one’s side is inherently better, it becomes harder to wholeheartedly reflect on one’s own deeds and prejudices. Defensiveness becomes the first reflex.

I would also say: In our 3000 year old history we Jews have seen this before.  So let’s see what we can learn from our history and our tradition.  

The Talmud (in tractate Yoma 9b) famously asks why the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed 2000 years ago, given that the society of the time was populated by people who studied the Torah and performed good deeds. The answer is Sinat Chinam – baseless hatred.  But commentaries on this text point out that this hatred wasn’t called “baseless” by the people committing it.  They felt completely justified. They thought they were the special righteous ones protecting society, which blinded them to the fact that their own tribalism and cruelty were destroying their civilization from within. 

Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld, a Orthodox rabbi who writes and lives in Israel, wonder why people would hate others for no real reason.  “What do people have to gain from [hate]?” he wonders. He posits, “Maybe it is the easy of facing life. .. [To love] I must see beyond our external differences and see the good inherent in them… It’s so much easier to invalidate others… By looking for and finding fault in others (which of course every human being has), I give myself a smug sense of my own inherent superiority — and I save myself the inconvenience of having to search for faults within myself. Direct your focus towards the faults of others — and you will never have to worry about your own… By failing to see godliness in [humankind]. I become quite comfortable with my own mediocrity.”   

It we are being honest, we see that it is much easier to point fingers and find a scapegoat to heap our sins on rather than take responsibility for them.  Perhaps that is why we read about the scapegoat in today’s Torah reading for Yom Kippur.

And then, when you start to judge others as fundamentally different, it makes it very easy to justify mistreating them. This is why it always begins with those at the margins – the immigrant, the stranger, the poor.  Partly because they have less recourse – but because they are different from me.  They believe different, they speak different, they act different.

Now, I don’t think most people would admit, even to themselves, that they think they are created better or worse than anyone else. The heart of Jewish teaching on this asserts, in Genesis chapter 1:27, that every human being is created in the image of God.  Everyone is infinitely precious and has infinite worth in the eyes of God. 

In Judaism, we place the emphasis on the goodness of a person’s actions rather than their soul’s worth. We each have within us an inclination or will towards doing both good or evil, known as the yetzer hatov or yetzer hara.  In Genesis 8:21, when God brought humans back from extinction after the Flood, God admitted, “The inclination of a man’s heart is evil from his youth.” This isn’t to say that we are inherently evil, corrupted, if you will, by original sin, which is not a Jewish concept. Rather, we have both good and evil within us, and right from the start of the Torah, our ancestors grow and develop their character from the choices they make.

Our Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs were not simply good or bad people.  They wrestled with God, often behaved with jealousy and pettiness, sought revenge, and were silent in the face of violence. They committed murder and did not own up to their failings. It’s right there, in the very first portion of the Torah.  So the tradition of reading and studying Torah is a practice of regular self-examination, of holding the human failings of our forebears and ourselves up to the light, exploring ethical issues, not shying away from asking critical questions.  In our tradition, learning and growth only comes with critical honesty and self-reflection.

As Sirius Black tells his godson Harry Potter, “We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.”   And, as Harry Potter so compellingly demonstrates, that choice is not always easy.  We must be vigilantly aware of our yetzer hara, our evil inclination, and keep it in check with our yetzer hatov, our capacity for good.  A person can do something generous one day and something selfish the next.  Also, we may have good intentions and still hurt someone. We can sincerely believe we are acting righteously while failing to recognize our own biases.  There is no such thing as perfection – we are always a work in progress, liable to err, and liable to be lured into doing the wrong thing.  

The haftarah we read from Isaiah on Yom Kippur chastises us for the hypocrisy of our ritual fasting when we have not done the hard work of facing our failings and making serious change.  But it’s not so simple as that: in the haftarah, Isaiah says that the people are sincere in their seeking of God and eager to learn the laws.  But they don’t see their moral failings; how they pray and fast, while at the same time oppressing their laborers and ignoring the hungry. There is a disconnect between their piety and their actions: maybe it’s a blind spot, maybe they think they will make the change tomorrow, or perhaps they sincerely think the same rules don’t apply to them.  

We aren’t monsters, we just have our blind spots, our excuses, our fears.  That does not give us a pass.  Hannah Arendt, in her early writings on the anti-semitism that she witnessed in early Nazi Germany, made the troubling observation that people fall into hate when it is normalized in society.  Hatred wasn’t fueled by ambition or ideology, she said, rather by a lack of critical thinking.  They would rather follow the crowd than stand up to hate.  She witnessed the trial of Adolph Eichmann, the infamous architect of the Final Solution and she described Eichmann an unremarkable person, a “joiner” who just wanted to fit in. 

And we are all susceptible.  Without being held accountable, the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, grows. The Talmud, in Sukkah 52b, employs a striking metaphor for how it happens:  “At first [the yetzer hara] is like a traveler, then he is like a guest, then he is like the owner of the house.” The idea is that destructive impulses often begin very small. A small rationalization can become a habit.  A small resentment can become hatred.  A little self-justification can become a worldview.

The rabbis of the Talmud give a practical response:  “If this wretch confronts you, drag him to the study house.”  In other words, don’t simply fight the impulse through willpower. Bring it into a place of learning and reflection.

Once a year, our tradition teaches, we make a full accounting of our souls – a cheshbon hanefesh.  It is a practice of examining ourselves honestly – tallying up our good deeds alongside the ways we’ve missed the mark.  It’s not for the purposes of determining whether we’re naughty or nice, or worthy or unworthy.  It is to encourage us to reflect critically, honestly about our actions, and to take responsibility or become more self aware so that the yetzer hara doesn’t slip in and make himself increasingly at home in your life.  

In other words, we don’t normalize hate or indifference. We normalize reflection and accountability. The practice of Al Chet on Yom Kippur is critical in this regard. When we recite the Al Chet we don’t confess only to spectacular sins. We confess to things like arrogance, dishonesty, gossip, acting hastily, acting foolishly, and failing to recognize our own wrongdoing. The liturgy assumes that even people who consider themselves decent need to look closely at themselves.

Judaism doesn’t ask us to prove our worth, or that we are good people. It asks us to be people who are willing to examine what we do, to take responsibility for our actions.

A colleague I dearly respect, Rav Claudia Kreiman, is an Argentinian-born rabbi living in the Boston area.  32 years ago, when she was 20 years old, her mother was murdered in a terrorist bombing at the AMIA in Buenos Aires, the central communal institution for Argentina’s Jewish community.  85 people were killed in this attack.  Every year, when the anniversary of the bombing comes around, Kreiman asks herself, “Who do I want to become in response to this tragedy?”  That question has shaped her and guided her life choices. She writes that it has taught her “that, while I cannot choose what happens to me, I remain responsible for what happens next–for the kind of person I become and the kind of world I help create.” 

And, it has also shaped the way she thinks about conflict.  “If terror seeks to shape the world through violence and fear, resisting terror requires that we not abandon our moral imagination.”  As a victim of terror, she could have chosen to walk through the world with fear, suspicion, and hatred. But, like other mourners, including Jenn Reiss Sillman, who spoke to us so powerfully on the second day of Rosh haShanah, she has searched for ways to live faithfully in spite of loss and so many unanswered questions.

She shared the following challenging text from the Talmud, Berachot 5a, “Rava said, and some say Rav Hisda: If a person sees that suffering has befallen them, they should examine their actions.”  While one could understand from this that suffering is a consequence of sin, she came to hear the text as saying that when someone experiences a terrible loss, they need to figure out who they are going to be in the face of suffering.

Will fear and suspicion guide our choices this year?  Will anger, fear, or pain inhibit us from challenging ourselves, from working on relationships, from engaging compassionately with people who have different views?

There is so, so much that is going wrong in the world.  I am not here to minimize anyone’s pain or be Rabbi Pollyanna about our ability to turn this all around.  But never doubt in your power and your presence to make a difference, even in just one person’s life. 

Permit me to share one last story, a true story that Rabbi Sharon Brous, of congregation IKAR in Los Angeles, shared with her congregation last week.  In 2015, members of her congregation, Hannah and Kathleen, were at the Jerusalem Pride Parade when a Jewish religious extremist stabbed to death a teenage girl, an LGBTQ ally. Still reeling from the attack– they had been standing only 10 feet away– Hannah and Kathleen went to a shabbat dinner the next night to celebrate the upcoming bat mitzvah of a family member.  Seated across the table from Hannah was Asher, a life long family friend. Asher had been radicalized, a part of the growing movement of zealots engaged in vandalism and violence against “lefties” and Palestinians. At first, Hannah was sick to even sit at the table with this person. But she stayed.

At the end of the meal, she stood up and blessed the bat mitzvah girl: “You live in a time and place of great brokenness,” she said. “Every day there are more and more stories happening right here in this country of hate crimes, retaliations… senseless hatred… Keep your eyes and ears and most of all, your heart open… And don’t ever lose your voice.” The experience turned Asher upside down. Hannah’s words awakened in him a kind of compassion, humanity, that he had buried and nearly lost.  Three years later, Asher showed up at the Pride Parade in Jerusalem, not to protest, but to participate. The following year, he was back again, this time with his baby in a stroller, a rainbow kippah, and a sign that read: “Hate kills! Love is the only answer.” Hannah reflected, years later, “It’s hard to stay at the table, but if we walk away from each other, nothing will ever get better.” 

The High Holidays challenge us to examine our biases and to grow from them. Our practice is not to point fingers, but to knock on the doors of our bruised hearts, asking for them to open. Today, we call ourselves to account so that when our voices are needed, we have enough faith in ourselves and love for humanity to stay at the table. You are not nothing; you could be everything to someone.  Just as we must never dismiss our capacity to judge and tear down and hurt, we must never underestimate our power for goodness.

Wishing you and your loved ones a safe, healthy, meaningful New Year.

Sermon for Erev Kol Nidre 5787 ~ September 20, 2026

I love pockets.  The latest trends of pockets in dresses has led me to embrace dresses in a way I never did as a girl.  I feel kind of unmoored when I wear something without any real pockets. Where will I put my hands if they get cold?  Where will I stash my keys or other items while walking the dog, or hiking, or exercising? Where will I put my ID, cash or credit card if I go to a concert or out dancing?  No, having a purse does not always work – it can be misplaced or stolen, and it is another accessory that has to coordinate well with your outfit.  For so, many reasons, pockets are liberating.

Having pockets is also practical spiritually.  The 18th century Polish rebbe,  Simcha Bunim of Peshischa taught, “Keep two truths in your pocket, and take them out according to the need of the moment.  Let one be, ‘I am but dust and ashes’ and the other, ‘For my sake the world was created.’” The two statements are intentionally held in tension: “I am but dust and ashes.” — I am mortal. I am limited. I will not be here forever. I am not the center of the universe. This keeps me humble. “For my sake the world was created.” — My life matters. My choices matter. I have a unique role to play, and the world is diminished if I do not fulfill it. This gives me courage and purpose.

The spiritual wisdom is that we need the balance of both truths, especially if we are engaged in the work of teshuvah and trying to examine ourselves and change our lives for the better.  During these intense days of self scrutiny we need the two pocket approach more than ever. 

And these are not easy times in which to find that balance. I can’t pretend to know all of what each of you is facing. But I do know that we are all living with fears—some deeply personal, and some that we share. 

There is war and economic instability. Measles is returning. Scientific research is being defunded and politically-motivated censorship happening in museums, national landmarks, and schools.  The Kennedy Center is closing.  Controversy around AI data centers. Rising prices and tariffs.  Anti-semitic rhetoric under the guise of being anti-Israel or anti-Zionist, and there are anti-semitic attacks that aren’t veiled at all. Anti-semitism on the left, and on the right, which increasingly puts Jews between a rock and a hard place.  And strife among Jews feels higher than ever before, which makes it hard to be, or stay engaged, in community – at a time when I believe we need each other more than ever.  And, Election Day is in eight weeks!   (Did I miss anything?!?)

And then there are the personal things that can throw us for a loop: a death, a divorce, a lost job, a loved one getting sick. Nothing I say today can make those things stop being true. And that’s tough to say, because I want you to flourish and thrive. But it feels like so much about our world right now is making it hard to thrive. 

Fear in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing.  After all, fear is a protective mechanism – it protects us from danger.  But left unchecked, it can keep us from taking risks, transcending our limitations, growing, or becoming the people we are capable of becoming. 

The Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bretslov is famous for saying, “The whole world is a narrow bridge, and the important thing is not to have fear – pachad – at all.”  Given his use of the word pachad, I think we might understand this as a warning not to allow fear to paralyze us. He also taught, “Do not despair”—assur le’hit’ya’esh—it is forbidden to give up.”  

So here is a great example of why I love the Hebrew language so much.  There are actually different words for fear in Hebrew. Pachad is the reactive, irrational, sometimes paralysing fear that grows out of worry about what might happen. Pachad is the experience of narrowness or helplessness – what if I don’t pass that test?  What if they don’t like me? Argh – I could fall off this narrow bridge!  That kind of fear can make us doubt ourselves. It can make us lose our sense of self. It can cause us to retreat into ourselves. 

Yirah, on the other hand, connotes the kind of fear in which one trembles and feels small in the presence of something vast, sacred, and magnificent. “I am but dust and ashes.” It is the kind of fearful awe that leaves you breathless—like standing at the Grand Canyon, or holding your child for the first time. All of a sudden the whole world is in your hands and you want to throw up.  “For my sake the world was created.”  Yirah is the balance of the two pockets.

And, contained in the subtle meaning of yirah is the mission of these Yamim Noraim, these the Days of Awe, which a term Jews have used for the High Holidays for about 900 years. The word nora, or awe, comes from the root word yirah, which means fear.  

So, are we supposed to feel fear during these holiest of days?  For what purpose?  Could it be the fear of punishment, the consequence of us having sinned and strayed from our intended path? One could argue that one should feel fear as we hold ourselves to account and face up to the harm we’ve caused.  We should tremble at the way we’ve been blind to the sufferings of others, or caused embarrassment, or missed the opportunity to do good.  

But if we associate these days primarily with dread or terrifying guilt, then we may shirk from the opportunity they present, which is to reflect on ourselves with honesty and hope to change for the better.  We need balance to find any sense of compassion for ourselves or believe that change is possible.   

As we journey through this teshuvah process, we carry these dual truths: I am but dust and ashes—and the world was created for my sake. We don’t choose one truth and reject the other. These are the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, the Days of Awesome Awfulness. 

My teacher Rabbi Shai Held quotes his teacher Bernard Steinberg as saying: “Awe is what happens to fear when it stops being about me.” I think that is a remarkable definition. Fear can make the “I” the center of the story. I can’t do this. I’m worried about that. What will happen to me?  But awe can move us beyond the “I.” But when fear opens into awe, we become aware of something beyond ourselves.

The late, great Wendell Berry beautifully describes the transformation of fear into awe in his famous poem, “The Peace of Wild Things:”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. 

We are broken open.  We rest in the grace of the world.  And in that grace, we can experience connection—to God, to other people, to the world, to the mystery of being alive.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called this “radical amazement.” One of the great dangers of modern life, Heschel taught, is that we become so accustomed to the world that we stop noticing it. The sun rises every morning, so we stop being amazed that there is a sun. We eat every day, so we stop being amazed that we have food. We wake up, breathe, see, hear, touch, and love—and all of it becomes ordinary.

Jewish practice tries to interrupt that way of seeing. We say blessings when we wake up. We say blessings when we eat. We say blessings when we encounter something beautiful, unusual, or new. Why? Because the world is full of wonder, and we need practices that bring us out of ourselves and back into the world.

Yirah is not necessarily a mystical experience. It is an orientation to the world, a humility of realizing one’s place in the world, whether it is great or small. It is the awareness that I am part of something larger than myself, and that this present moment is precious. 

The moments of yirah I have experienced this year have sustained me: sitting with someone in their final moments and saying the confessional prayer, asking for release and relief; shepherding someone into Judaism and getting to say “Amen” when they say the blessing after immersing in the mikvah; standing outside during one of those extraordinary summer thunderstorms; witnessing a deeply anxious kid I care about have a breakthrough because they courageously tried something new.

These moments can leave us speechless. They remind us that there is something extraordinary about simply being alive. But they are not commonplace.

Which is precisely why we have the Yamim Noraim. During these ten days, Judaism asks us to stop. To reflect on our lives. To confront questions of life and death. To name our fears. To remember our mortality and the passage of time. 

The special liturgy of the High Holidays in the Unetaneh Tokef prayers does not allow us to avoid our fears. It names them: Who will live and who will die? Who will be secure and who will be vulnerable? Who will be at peace and who will be afraid? There is something powerful about naming our fears together. Because once we name them, perhaps they do not have to control us.

The Yamim Noraim give us a container in which to face what frightens us—and then to transform that fear into something else. Into humility. Into gratitude. Into responsibility. Into awe. Into action. Into change.

Maybe that is why we begin the Jewish year with fear—not because God wants us terrified, and not because Judaism wants us drowning in guilt, but because fear can awaken us to what matters most.

Yirah reminds us that life is also wondrous. The Days of Awe invite us to hold both truths: “I am but dust and ashes,” and “For my sake the world was created.”  To remember how small we are. To remember how much we matter. To face what frightens us. To open ourselves to wonder, humility, and courage.

One pocket keeps me humble. The other keeps me from giving up. One reminds me that I am part of something infinitely larger than myself. The other reminds me that I have a sacred role to play within it. And on this most holy day, when we feel God’s compassionate presence mostly closely, we remember that we never have to do it alone.

Shana tova.  Gmar chatimah tovah.

Sermon for Rosh haShana Day 1 5787 ~ September 12, 2026

I don’t know about you, but it still feels like summer. Either that, or I am having difficulty accepting that the summer is over. Part of it is that the High Holidays are so early this year. But another piece, for me, is that I turned 50 last month, and somehow every summer vacation and celebration was related to that—from Josh and my first vacation without kids to Costa Rica, to the wonderful Hoedown my dad led at Kol Emet.

Turning 50 has also come with a certain amount of reckoning, which has become part of the writing and reflection I do as the New Year approaches.

And I have also been preparing for my upcoming sabbatical, which, as many of you know, begins in November and continues through May. It is customary for clergy and people in other professions to take a sabbatical every seven years. This practice is based on the biblical concept of Shabbat: that every seventh day, or every seventh year, we need to step away from cultivating and creating in order to rest and renew. Even the land gets a sabbatical. This is called shmitah.

And wouldn’t you know it, the seventh year and the fiftieth year are very much linked in the Torah and in our tradition. Fifty is seven times seven, plus one. After seven cycles of shmitah, or 49 years, the Torah describes a fiftieth year called yovel, the Jubilee.  

The Jubilee is an almost magical, idyllic period: debts are released, land returns to its original holders, and people return to their families.  The Jubilee is a powerful reminder that all that we have achieved, and all that we consider ours, ultimately belongs to God. 

At 50, I feel profoundly blessed: to have my health, a worthy and meaningful profession, strong-minded children and energetic parents, a great sibling, eighteen years of marriage that grounds me, thoughtful friends. I am awed by these blessings, but when I reflect on my experiences, accomplishments, life knowledge, and everything in my possession, my grasp on it all is not so tight – I know this life is what I have been loaned, and whatever I have been blessed with I need to share and spread around.

Fifty is an interesting age. I am no longer young, but neither am I old. I stretch to keep up with my kids while at the same time keeping up with my aging parents in new ways. It is also the age when we start getting those AARP notices. Midlife reaps its benefits and its consequences. I keep thinking of the Bon Jovi song (a GenX classic!) “Woah, we’re halfway there, woah living on a prayer!”

No longer do I take my health and my body for granted. On the one hand, I live in fear that I could hurt my back putting on a sock.  On the other hand, I am physically fit to the point where I can do headstands again!  I took a ballet class this summer and marveled at my muscle memory as poses came back to me after 30 or 40 years since my last ballet class.

It is an age when life experience has dealt us a fair share of curveballs, and we begin to understand that our successes have as much to do with luck and blessing as with hard work and effort.

We are carried by God in ways we don’t always recognize. We enjoy our milestones because we know they aren’t guaranteed to anyone. And 50 is also an age when you realize that you still have so much more to do and to give.

At 50, one has experience, skills, and perspective developed over decades of work and education. At 50 we have proven ourselves professionally and we still have a lot to give.  But, there is an urgency now, to leave things better for the next generation while it is still possible to do so.  But, at 50, we are not robots with limitless energy, and so one begins to understand the wisdom in resting.

I have been blessed with a six-month sabbatical, which is humbling because I know not everyone gets that chance. Many people ask me, “How will you use that time?” I never quite know how to answer. Partly because I don’t fully know yet.  Partly because up until now I have been mostly focused on making sure Kol Emet is set up well for when I am away.  But mostly, it is because the notion of sabbatical is fundamentally not about how one uses time.

We tend to think of time as something we should use well. We schedule it, organize it, fill it. We talk about “making the most of our time.” We measure productivity by how much we can accomplish in a day, a week, a year.

But the Torah asks us to imagine time in a very different way.

The Torah doesn’t simply divide time into days, weeks, months, and years. It sanctifies them. The very first chapter of Genesis culminates not with another act of creation but with Shabbat. God stops creating and blesses the seventh day:  “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation.” (Genesis 2:3)

The implication is profound: the purpose of time is not simply to accomplish things. Just as God did, so too humans have six days of work, and then one day of rest, in order to honor the work, to bless the time and to make a separation for what might come next.  And the land rests too: there are six years where it is cultivated followed by one year of shmita, which means “a letting go,” or literally, “to let fall.”  

A sabbatical is an intentional letting go— it is a chance to step outside our normal roles and routines so that one can listen, learn, reflect, rest, and perhaps become different people than we were before.  It is shmita.

Another way that the Torah imagines time differently, is as something that is cyclical.  Time isn’t simply moving us forward toward “more.” It cycles us back to a place of rest, reflection, release, and renewal, every seventh year. The biblical calendar is built around recurring cycles, often around the number seven.  Shabbat is the seventh day, the head of the year and Yom Kippur, the Shabbat of all Shabbats, begins at the seventh month, the shmita is the seventh year, and the Jubilee comes after seven shmita cycles.

The concept of sabbatical is a small-scale version of the Torah’s great idea of Jubilee, in which we release all that we’ve accumulated over time – all the clutter, all the ego and self-important notions of ourselves, and try to return to our original borders, as it were. It is a time to stop cultivating the field and ask: What kind of field are we cultivating in the first place? A time to stop producing and ask: What is actually worth producing? A time to step away and see more clearly what we are stepping toward.

So hopefully you can understand the importance of a sabbatical.  A rabbi’s work is deeply relational. We are called witness and sanctify holy time throughout the year cycle and life cycle.  We accompany people through births and deaths, celebrations and crises, weddings and funerals, illness and healing, doubt and faith.  We are called to be present, and to bring the necessary perspective to bear on a trying situation or new challenge.

One might think that to be a good rabbi one must always be available and always answer whenever there is a need. But the Torah doesn’t actually ask us to live that way. Even the land needs a sabbatical. Perhaps people do, too.

This will be a chance to learn – for my own growth and edification.  A chance to write – for myself, not for a sermon or dvar torah or a deadline.  A chance to pray from the pews as a private citizen and not as a leader of the congregation.  A change to explore my creativity in ways that have nothing to do with Judaism or being a rabbi.  (Is that even possible?)

I will return to Kol Emet being a better rabbi, able to extend myself once again because I will be regrounded and rerooted in my own soil. And, I will have had a chance to miss you!

But I also know that this sabbatical will be good, even important, for this congregation as well. A healthy community should not be overly dependent on one person. This is wisdom we already embody, as a very engaged and participatory congregation.  But as much as you may have come to rely upon my particular strengths, skills, and spirit, you know that a congregation’s strength, its identity, and its vision does not reside in one person.  It shines in all of us.  

Gloria Steinem, of blessed memory, gave an interview in 2017 about challenges facing activists in which she said, “People keep asking me ‘who are you going to give your torch to?’ And I always say to them, I am not giving up my torch, thank you very much, I’m keeping my torch and I’m using it to light other people’s torches. Because the whole idea that there’s only one torch is the problem. No wonder we don’t know where we’re going. Everybody has to have a torch.”

Gloria Steinem was not just a remarkable activist and leader, she was a mentor and a friend to so many across the generations. She recognized that a movement isn’t just about principles, goals, and actions, it’s about people.  She believed that people are what makes a movement move.  So as she aged, she was about sharing her torch as much as she was about sparking and honoring and appreciating the torches of others.  One torch in itself is not sustainable; we have to nurture and spark one another’s torches.  

So whenever one person has to step back, other people have the opportunity to step forward.  Lay leaders discover capacities they didn’t know they had.  Members take greater ownership. New voices emerge. Sparks fly.

But that doesn’t happen overnight.  We have been preparing for this shift now for several months, through service leading classes and opportunities, people offering to give divrei torah, lead Torah study, and teach classes.  We have an extremely robust and organized calendar of Limmud/Adult education offerings this year, much more than in previous years. Longtime members are stepping up in new ways, and new members are jumping in with both feet. And of course, we are blessed to have Michelle Katz, a rabbinical student in her final year at RRC, who will be providing pastoral support, rabbinic guidance and spiritual leadership this whole year, even before my sabbatical begins.  

Sometimes we think good leadership means being indispensable.  But perhaps the opposite is true.  Perhaps one measure of good leadership is whether we can create a community that doesn’t need us every minute. A rabbi who does everything might unintentionally teach: You need me. A rabbi who steps away can teach: You can do this. That is not abandonment. It is trust.  And trust is one of the foundations of building sacred community.

This is why I don’t think a sabbatical should be understood as an absence. It is a form of presence. Presence to learning. Presence to reflection and listening. Presence to family. Presence to God and to the faith that there is something larger than what we can see. Presence to questions that are difficult to hear when our lives are constantly filled with noise.  Presence to the combined light and vision of our community.

A sabbatical asks me: What kind of rabbi do I want to become?  But it also asks this congregation: What kind of community do we want to become?  Those questions belong together.

Every year, Rosh Hashanah gives us the opportunity to examine the past and imagine a different future. Yom Kippur allows us to release what we have carried. And this is another piece of wisdom of Jewish time.  Jewish time is not simply linear, going from past → present → future.  It is also recursive: we return. Time allows for beginning again

In Leviticus 25:10, when the Torah discusses the Jubilee, it says, “You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family.” The key word is return. The Torah’s idea of renewal isn’t necessarily to become someone entirely new. It can be return to who you were meant to be.

Part of that verse, by the way, is famously inscribed on the Liberty Bell.  It is an interesting coincidence that we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, its fifth Jubilee cycle. Perhaps we too, as a nation, can return and recover our light, and rediscover what we are meant to be, for ourselves and for the world in this new day and age.

There is one final reason the Jubilee speaks so powerfully to me this year.  According to Leviticus, when the Jubilee is proclaimed, it is done on Yom Kippur, through the sound of the shofar. Yom Kippur is the day when we strip away the things we use to define ourselves: our accomplishments, our possessions, our status, our titles, even, for a brief time, our ordinary physical needs. It is called Shabbat Shabbaton – the Sabbath of all Sabbaths.

And then, at the end of this most holy day, we hear the shofar. It is the sound of release. It is the sound of a new beginning.

So when we hear the shofar this year, perhaps we can hear it in two ways.  We can hear it as a call to wake up.  And we can hear it as a call to let go. To wake up to the possibilities of who we might become.  And to let go of the assumption that we have to keep doing everything the way we have always done it.

The shofar says:  Make room. Make room for rest. Make room for renewal. Make room for other people to get involved. Make room for new ideas and possibilities. Make room for God and new manifestations of holiness.  Make room for yourself.  And make room for the future.

At 50, I am beginning to understand that we don’t own our lives any more than the ancient Israelites owned the land.  They were entrusted with the land.  I have been entrusted with this life.  And perhaps the best way we can honor the gift of our lives is not always to hold on more tightly. Sometimes it is to release. To trust. To have faith. To make space. To listen. And then, when the shofar sounds, to return.

May we all hear the shofar as a call to return—to our best selves, to our families, to our community and the movements we are building, to our purpose, and to what matters most.

Shabbat shalom.  Shmita tova. Shanah tovah.

Sermon for Erev Rosh haShana 5787 ~ September 11, 2026

I was recently sitting in a waiting room of a doctor’s office, waiting to be called for one of those required screenings one needs at a certain age.  The TV was tuned to an episode of the Andy Griffith show, which was shown in black and white. Then the commercials came on.  There was this one that was advertising a Survival Food Kit, where you could “Claim a 3-Month Food Supply and Get 2 Months FREE! While Supplies Last.”    

I was intrigued.  I went to my phone to find out more details: the website said:
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Our kids, grandkids, parents & neighbors. Because the truth is, you’re probably going to need it.
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Most folks think a bad storm, blackout or food shortage won’t hit close to home.
So they don’t prepare, and the results are devastating.
In a true emergency, 4Patriots survival food becomes… #1 Item to Hoard in a Crisis!
So Tasty, You Wouldn’t Know It Was Survival Food.”

It’s actually not a bad idea. We may scoff at people who stockpile survival food or build underground bunkers, but natural disasters seem to be increasingly frequent and devastating. We worry about the climate crisis. We wring our hands about the state of our government and the future of our planet. We donate to help when disasters strike.  But how many of us have emergency plans at home? 

We don’t like to contemplate such questions, but we never know when disaster may happen to you.  Are you ready?  What is your plan?

Climate change may be a newer crisis, but as a rabbi I can tell you these questions are not new. Consider the words of Unetaneh Tokef, the central prayer of these Days of Awe, which dates back to the 11th century:

Who will live and who will die?
Who will die at his predestined time and who before his time?
Who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast?
Who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm?
Who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning?
Who will rest and who will wander?
Who will live in harmony and who will be harried?
Who will enjoy tranquillity and who will suffer?
Who will be impoverished and who will be enriched?
Who will be degraded and who will be exalted?

Many of you are probably very grateful that this doom and disaster liturgy is sung in Hebrew. But facing our vulnerabilities and mortality is precisely what we do during the High Holidays! We ask ourselves – are we prepared for whatever may come?  We confront the unsettling truth that we don’t get to decide what the coming year will bring.

So, if that’s true, perhaps we should simply enjoy life while we can. As the saying goes, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” How many of you know where this quote comes from?  If you thought Shakespeare, well, so did I.  But it actually comes from the Torah—or, more precisely, it’s a combination of two biblical verses. The first is Ecclesiastes 8:15: “Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.”  The second is Isaiah 22:13, “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.” 

I have to admit, I find this philosophy pretty appealing. If tomorrow we may die, perhaps tonight is a good night for dessert. Or maybe a glass of wine and Netflix. Or maybe staying up a little too late talking with people we love.

But we also encounter a very different “life is uncertain, eat dessert first” kind of teaching from our rabbinic sages. In the Talmud, in Tractate Shabbat, “Rabbi Eliezer says: “Repent one day before your death.” His students asked him: “But how does a person know on which day he will die?”  He replied: “All the more so is this a good piece of advice, as one should repent today lest he die tomorrow.”

You know, if someone could just give me a little advance notice—“Just so you know, Tuesday is going to be your last day”—I could get a lot done.  A deadline is a great motivator!

I could make some important phone calls. I could apologize to a few people. I could finally organize the photos on my phone. I could even clean out my inbox. Well… maybe not my inbox. At some point, we have to accept that there are emails that will simply die with us.

But…why go there? Why mention death?  Why couldn’t he just have said “repent every day?” Was it really necessary to bring in a worst case scenario? 

In a word: yes. Death gives us a deadline unlike any other. We can postpone a work project. We can put off cleaning the basement. We can tell ourselves we’ll deal with that difficult conversation next week.  But having a brush with death reminds us that there are some things we cannot postpone forever. But Rabbi Eliezer’s point is that we don’t get that information. We don’t know which day will be our last.  

Five years ago, we commissioned a new Sefer Torah for our congregation, and we searched for a fitting scribe to do this job.  We found Linda Kaye, who was across the world in New Zealand, a woman who found scribal arts later in life and had never scribed a whole Torah.  But she was certain she was ready, and her mentors vouched for her.  She was 70 years old, and didn’t want to wait to fulfil the mitzvah of writing a Torah.  And so we granted her that opportunity.  She experienced health issues toward the end and needed others to carry her across the finish line, but she did it.  Sadly, Linda passed away suddenly a few weeks ago.  And now, every time I open up her Torah and see the Hebrew she so lovingly penned, I feel her presence.  Linda’s Torah is here in the world because she didn’t wait.  Our Torah was her chocolate cake.

So don’t wait. Don’t wait to make amends. Don’t wait to forgive. Don’t wait to ask for forgiveness. Don’t wait to tell someone you love them. Don’t wait to become the person you keep saying you want to become. We think we have tomorrow, but tomorrow is never guaranteed.  That is the sobering truth. 

But, that is a pretty inconvenient truth.  We have so many daily responsibilities and commitments that feel a lot more real and pressing which are not hypothetical. 

And this is precisely the whole point of the High Holidays. They are engineered to help us face all the inconvenient truths we’ve avoided over the past year.

Rosh Hashanah is, in many ways, about renewal. We celebrate the birthday of the world. We imagine creation beginning again. We crown God as Sovereign. It’s sort of a Pinterest vision board for the person and the world we wish to design.

On Yom Kippur, we strip away many of the things that ordinarily ground us in everyday life. We don’t eat or drink. We set aside professional responsibilities and physical pleasures. And, we practice letting go and the art of dying. We grieve the past year and loved ones we’ve lost.  We grieve lost opportunities and examine the meaning of our lives.  We confess our mistakes. We wear white, the color of purity, the color of a burial shroud. In a sense, Yom Kippur asks us to imagine our lives stripped down to what really matters, a spiritual Konmari process if you will. 

Over the next ten days, we’re going to spend quite a bit of time looking back and reflecting: What did I do wrong? Where did I mess up? Whom did I hurt?

Those are important questions. But teshuvah is also forward-looking. Which brings us back to our two sayings: “Repent one day before you die.” And: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” Which is it?

Both sayings begin with exactly the same realization: We’re going to die, maybe even tomorrow. They just give us different answers to the problem of our potentially imminent demise. One says: If life is short, enjoy it. The other says: If life is short, don’t leave anything on the table. Maybe these Days of Awe are asking us to hold both ideas at the same time. We don’t know how much time we have, so what do we do with that knowledge?

One response is: Have another piece of cake. And, frankly, sometimes that is excellent advice.

But the other response is: Don’t wait. Don’t wait to tell someone you love them. Don’t wait to call your parent. Don’t wait to forgive.  Don’t wait to ask for forgiveness. Don’t wait to take the trip. Don’t wait to say thank you. Don’t wait to tell someone that what they did mattered to you. Don’t wait to become the person you keep saying you want to become. 

And—stock up now, while supplies last! Claim your three-month food supply and get two months FREE!

But seriously, if you knew you had only one year left, what would you do differently? Who would you spend more time with? What would you stop worrying about? What would you let go of? What would you make room for? What is one thing you don’t want to put off anymore?

We cannot safeguard the future. We cannot know what storms are coming, or what joys, losses, surprises, or blessings the coming year will bring. But we can decide what we do with the time we have. The rabbis didn’t say, Repent when you get your life together. They said: One day before you die. Which, inconveniently, might be today.

So perhaps the deeper wisdom behind Rabbi Eliezer’s strange advice is not that we should spend our lives preparing for death, quite the opposite.  But it’s when we realize that life is finite, we can pay better attention to life while we are living it.

Judaism asks us, simply, to live. To “choose life.” To celebrate. To laugh. To eat together. To tell stories. To sing badly. To dance badly. To love the people who are here. To enjoy the absurd and beautiful fact that, for reasons we don’t entirely understand, we are here.

So maybe we don’t need to choose between repentance and celebration. Maybe the Jewish answer is: Do both. Make things right–and eat the dessert. Say you’re sorry–and stay up late talking with someone you love. Think about the year ahead–and enjoy the year you have.  Because we don’t know how much time is left, but we know we have this moment. 

And, for now, that is enough.

Shana tovah.

offered at the Garden of Reflection in Lower Makefield Township, PA, September 11, 2026

Invocation for 25th Commemoration of the Attacks on September 11, 2001

On September 11, 2001, the attacks occurred on a Tuesday. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, began the evening of September 17, 2001, six days later.  So Jews around the world entered the Jewish New Year in the immediate aftermath of an event that had profoundly shattered our sense of safety and predictability.  This year, we commemorate 25 years since that terrible day, and tonight, Rosh Hashanah begins. That creates a striking juxtaposition:

Rosh Hashanah asks us to confront the preciousness and the fragility of life.  September 11 made that fragility impossible to ignore.  The High Holiday liturgy suddenly sounded different, in particular the Unetaneh Tokef prayer, which asks “Who shall live and who shall die?”  It continues by imagining all the different ways a person’s fate might unfold.  Leonard Cohen made this central High Holiday prayer known beyond Jewish circles in his song “Who by Fire?”

Normally, Jews encounter those words as ancient liturgy—perhaps moving, perhaps frightening, but somewhat abstract. After September 11, they were anything but abstract.

Nearly 3,000 people had died suddenly and catastrophically. People who had gone to work that morning did not come home. Families were waiting for phone calls that would never come. First responders entered buildings from which they would never emerge.

Today we stand, humbled and awed by the enormity of our losses.  The course of our lives have been forever changed, shaped by grief and memory. And as a nation, we will never be the same.  25 years, and it seems like it was just yesterday.

But 25 years is also a lifetime.   An entire generation has grown up since those attacks.  So its confluence with Rosh haShanah this year brings us back to another central piece of wisdom, which is to hold, with love and honor and grief, the preciousness of each and every life that we lost that day.  The Unetaneh Tokef prayer says, “You number, and count, and determine the life, one by one, of all who have lifebreath within.

We should not let the awfulness of what happened eclipse the beauty and unique spirit of any of the 3000 individual souls we lost, each of them someone’s child, each one a child of God, created in the Divine image.  

May our remembrance today honor their lives and make us more acutely aware of the preciousness of life and exquisite fragility of being alive.

Amen.

Sermon for Yom Kippur 5786

Many of you know that I have Jamaican heritage.  My paternal grandmother, Olive Levy Rosenfield, who passed away in 2010, was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica.  She proudly claimed that her ancestors came to Jamaica with Christopher Columbus when they were fleeing the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. While my mother, our family’s genealogist, hasn’t traced our ancestry quite that far back, she has documented at least eight generations of the Levy family.

I had the blessing of traveling to Jamaica twice to explore this heritage — once in 2002 with my grandmother, and again in 2006 for the 350th anniversary celebration of Jamaica’s small but enduring Jewish community.

I’ve always taken pride in my Jamaican Jewish roots, especially because they are so intertwined with my grandmother, with whom I was so close. Though she left Jamaica to marry my grandfather in 1942, her accent never abated. She filled my life with intense color and emotion. From her I inherited a love of singing, dancing, and painting. Everything reminded her of a song. She would sing Jamaican ditties to me—often with dirty lyrics! For holidays and family gatherings, she made flavorful goat curry and oxtail stew, in stark contrast to the bagels and kugel served in our Ashkenazi New York community. Because of her, I grew into a rabbi who was deeply interested in the diverse heritage, history, and culture of Jewish people around the world, recognizing the diversity of the Jewish experience. 

That’s why we started Sharing Our Stories at Kol Emet. Over the years, members have shared their stories of having Scottish-Jewish and Cuban-Jewish heritage, as well as stories of conversion, queer-Jewish stories, and journeys through Orthodoxy, Reconstructionism, even atheism. It’s been a beautiful way to get to know one another, to learn from one another, and to honor the diverse backgrounds and beliefs that make up our community.

But I haven’t shared my own story, not really.  And what I’ve told you just now about my Jamaican Jewish heritage is the tip of the iceberg.  For years I have been immersed in my family genealogy and history, and it’s truly fascinating.  But it’s also complicated, and painful.  History, as we know, has layers. And when you dig deep enough, you uncover truths that are harder to face. 

You may know that, for centuries, Jamaica was a major hub of the transatlantic slave trade. I had realized that some of my ancestors almost certainly were slave owners — after all, my great-great-grandparents had a plantation. I’d been to its site and chronicled all the names in the family cemetery. 

I also knew that there was an earlier time in Jamaican history, during Spanish rule, when Jews were not allowed to be land owners.  So, they became traders and merchants in the ports.  And what did they trade?  My mother, our family’s amateur generologist, discovered that one ancestor in particular, Alexandre Lindo, owned and was the captain of at least two ships, ships that carried kidnapped Africans through the harrowing Middle Passage between Africa and Jamaica.  He was also known for his brutal tactics in selling masses of enslaved people “efficiently” and thus is considered by historians as the most notorious Jewish slave trader of the 18th century.

When I learned this, I felt shame—a deep, unsettling shame. It wasn’t anything I personally did; I just didn’t know how to reckon with this terrible piece of my history that I was now aware of. I felt that I could no longer talk about my Jamaican heritage with pride.  So, I didn’t. I stayed silent. 

And that, as Brené Brown teaches, is exactly how shame thrives.  Brown, a researcher and storyteller, says that shame isn’t just about what we’ve done — it’s about who we believe we are.  I could certainly resonate with that.  

She defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” (Brené Brown, “The Power of Vulnerability” TED Talk, 2010)  We don’t all experience shame the same way or for the same reasons, but it’s an undeniably powerful feeling that is hard to shake.  I think about people who have survived violence, extreme poverty, family separation, grave illness, and more – people who haven’t done anything wrong but who often feel shame about what they went through and still carry the stigma of their experience.  Why is that?  

Brown also teaches that shame thrives on three things: secrecy, silence, and judgment.  And that the way to dismantle shame is through vulnerability— telling our story to those we trust, people who have earned the right to hear it. (Brown, “Daring Greatly,” 2012)  Sometimes society shuts down the voices of those who speak uncomfortable truths, those who survived.  It tells us there is no acceptable place to tell our story.  And sometimes it is ourselves that shuts down the voices inside us that whisper our shame.  

So here we are, on the most sacred day of the year, the day of moral reckoning, a day for fasting, reflection, and forgiveness.  We confess our shame and regret and we lean into God’s infinite compassion.  This is an opportunity to examine our shame and hold it up to the light.

The first use of the word “shame,” or boosha, in the Torah is in the story of Adam and Eve, and notably, it appears in the negative form:

וַיִּהְיוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם עֲרוּמִּים, הָאָדָם וְאִשְׁתּוֹ–וְלֹא יִתְבֹּשָׁשׁוּ

“And the two of them were naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.” (Genesis 2:25)

Adam and Eve did not feel shame—because they had not yet become aware of good and evil.  However, after they eat from the Tree of Knowledge, the text says, “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked.” (Genesis 3:7) So, once they gained knowledge, they also gained the capacity for shame.  

The text says when they beheld their nakedness, they wanted to cover themselves up.  Perhaps it was not so much their physical nakedness they wanted to conceal, but what it represented: their vulnerability, their imperfection, their mortality. In their new consciousness, they saw what was lacking and felt exposed. They now could see themselves more clearly – humans, possessing both an evil inclination and a good inclination, imperfect, flawed. 

As humans, we are not created to be perfect. We are created with both yetzer ha-tov (the good inclination) and yetzer ha-ra (the evil inclination). We are meant to struggle. And we are born into a world that is already broken—a world shaped by sins that predate us: racism, antisemitism, slavery, climate destruction, misogyny, and war.

I was raised in a liberal Jewish community that championed the ideals of  Israel and Zionism. But Israel was much more than an ideal to me. I lived in Israel for a year at age 12 and became a Bat Mitzvah there, at a progressive congregation in Jerusalem. I returned in college, to study there for a semester, and then again before starting rabbinical school, spending a summer at Hebrew University.

It was the year 2000. Every day, I rode a bus through East Jerusalem filled with Jews in kippot, Arab men in keffiyehs, and young soldiers in army uniforms and guns slung across their backs. There was an ease and a hope on those bus rides I honestly took for granted. But just three weeks after I left Ariel Sharon ascended the Temple Mount, and the Second Intifada erupted, seemingly out of nowhere. 

How could this have happened – after the relative peace I had witnessed??  That’s when I started learning the Palestinian narrative—their experience of displacement, their immense losses, and their devastation. What I thought I knew was suddenly incomplete. 

And there it was again: shame. Israel was part of my identity, much like Jamaica. But how could I hold my deep connection to Israel alongside the pain and injustice I now saw? Thankfully, I was blessed to be in rabbinical school, in a place that honors questions, encourages deep reflection, and honors complexity, of holding multiple truths at once.

But that was 25 years ago.  As we know, Israel is a different story, in some ways, than Jamaica, in that there are red lines in the American Jewish community around any criticism of Israel. There is a silencing that leads to shame, and that shame creates distance and judgment—within our community and within ourselves. This is not new.

But now, as the war in Gaza nears its second full year, we find ourselves in an impossible place, heartbroken for those we love in Israel and for all we lost on October 7, 2023, and horrified by the immensity of the suffering we are seeing in Gaza, with no end to war in sight.  In addition, the escalation of anti-Semitism from the left and right is truly alarming. 

Yossi Klein haLevi, the noted Israeli author and thinker, describes our quandary: “To be an ambivalent Jew today is not to be uncertain so much as torn between conflicting certainties.” But, in this toxic atmosphere, if we dare critique or question or doubt, we might “risk inadvertently reinforcing the campaign of hatred and lies” against us. (Yossi Klein haLevi, Our Season of Reckoning: Israel’s Moral Crossroads in Gaza, The Times of Israel blogs, Sept. 7, 2025) 

There is no space for us to make moral sense of any of this, no space for us to share our fears, doubts, questions, no space to delve into nuance or complexity. At times it feels that to express sympathy for one side is to deny the humanity of the other. 

But this isn’t a zero sum game.  We know the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is decades old, and we know there are multiple truths and multiple narratives that often contradict one another. But it is so hard to simply hold the multiple truths of this terrible conflict in our minds and hearts at once. 

The Tree of Knowledge wasn’t just about sin—it was about complexity. Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, that is, the tree of awareness and consciousness, and realized there were multiple truths that conflicted with one another. And that, I believe, was the seed of their shame.

Shame often arises when our brains perceive a contradiction between our values and our actions—or between our values and our identity. Think about someone who steals a necklace. If they believe stealing is wrong and see themselves as an honest person, the act of stealing creates dissonance. That dissonance produces shame.

Thus, shame, in itself, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, in his comment on the story of Adam and Eve, the medieval commentator Rashi teaches that shame is the first sign of moral consciousness. It can be a powerful indicator of when one has transgressed upon one’s morals and beliefs.  

Shame, then, is something to listen to. It’s the beginning of teshuvah— of return. We can’t undo the past. Some things cannot be restored. But shame reminds us where the cracks are. 

There is a movie that every kid 10 and older of every gender and the grown ups who live with are watching called KPOP Demon Hunters.  I highly recommend it.  It’s Korean, with super catchy music.  A girl named Rumi is a singer in a popular band and is adored onstage, but she has a secret. Hidden under her sleeves are markings that reveal that her father was a demon.  She fears that if people knew, they wouldn’t love or admire her anymore. The movie portrays a culture of perfection, of wearing masks and never revealing your flaws.  The demons prey on this facade, whispering “You are too much. You are not enough. You will never belong.”  Her fear echoes so many of our fears today: If so-and-so knew this about me, would they still respect me? Would I still belong?” Ultimately she realized that the only way to overpower the demons is to reveal her scars and embrace who she truly  is.  

It sounds so easy, right?  But the culture of perfection is so hard to overpower in one’s psyche.  The patterns that Rumi is ashamed of are the result of factors she couldn’t control in her childhood that made her feel like she needed to hide forever. Her mother figure tells she needs to hide her scars forever.

But there is no such thing as perfect.  Everything is messy, and ugly under the surface.  And we see that pushing away shame actually feeds it.  Denying shame tells us there is only one valid truth, that we need to pick a side. Denying shame tells us that if we empathize with the suffering of another people, that we betray our own.  Denying shame is why people are removing books from school libraries and exhibits in museums that portray white people in a critical light, as slave owners and violent defenders of segregation. In my case, denying shame also means denying my pride and connection to my own heritage. 

Shame keeps us morally aware and humble. It is not, as some might claim, a form of self-hatred.  Rather, it is a spiritual tool, and that according to our sages, can lead us to wisdom and keep us from repeating our mistakes. 

Our tradition is full of figures who felt deep shame and used it as a catalyst for change. Take King David. After his sin with Batsheva, he is confronted by the prophet Nathan and immediately confesses, “Chatati l’Adonai – I have sinned before God” (2 Samuel 12:13). Even though God forgives him, David still feels the lingering weight of his shame.  The shame remains—not as punishment, but as memory. As a moral guidepost.

So the question becomes: What do we do with our shame? How do we let it guide us without letting it define us? Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel answers this beautifully in his book God in Search of Man. He writes:

“Should we then despair because of our being unable to retain perfect purity? We should, if perfection were our goal… All we can do is to try to wring our hearts clean in contrition. Contrition begins with a feeling of shame at our being incapable of disentanglement from the self. To be contrite at our failures is holier than to be complacent in perfection.” (Heschel, God in Search of Man, 1955)

This is the spiritual invitation of Yom Kippur. We beat our chests and confess Ashamnu — “We are guilty.” But right before that, we sing Ki Anu Amecha, reminding ourselves: We are Your people. You are our God. We are Your children. You are our Parent. We confess our failures not because we are worthless, but because we are beloved. Because we know we can be more.

Our morning liturgy offers a quiet but profound prayer as we go into the Shema:  “V’lo neivosh, v’lo nikalem, v’lo nikashel l’olam va’ed. — May we never be stuck in shame, embarrassment, humiliation.”

In that prayer, we ask God to enlighten our eyes with Torah, to keep us connected to our purpose, to lead us proudly back home–and from shame.  Why? Because shame isolates you from Torah, God, and home. The deepest Jewish worry is alienation from one another because of shame.  

Rumi sings,
“The worst of what I came from, patterns I’m ashamed of
Things that even I don’t understand
I broke into a million pieces, and I can’t go back
But now I’m seeing all the beauty in the broken glass
The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony
My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like”

We live in a world that punishes vulnerability, that shames difference, and that tells us to hide our complexity. But Yom Kippur invites us to do the opposite. This day calls us to step forward — not perfect, but honest. Not proud, but open. Not blameless, but beloved. Not to erase the difficult parts of our story, but to face them. To carry all the parts of ourselves with integrity.

We are not meant to carry shame as a permanent identity. We are meant to transform it.  Find ways to share your story.  Listen compassionately when others entrust you with their questions and doubts.  Commit to good deeds that restore your sense of pride and dignity, that can serve as a positive example to others.  

The Christian author Ann Voskamp writes: “Shame dies when our stories are told in safe places.” But how many safe places are left?  When there is no safe space to speak from a place of vulnerability, confusion, or shame, the silence becomes distance, and the distance becomes disconnection— not only from community, but from Judaism itself.

That is why we must continue creating space at Kol Emet for people to share where we are really coming from. Our backgrounds, our struggles, our beliefs—even when they are complex or messy. Especially then.

Sometimes the shame we carry isn’t even about things we’ve done—it’s about things done by our ancestors, our people, or the communities we love.  In those cases, shame is a kind of mourning: a disappointment in those we identify with.  In my case, the shame I felt around my Jamaican ancestry pushed me to ask deeper questions about my responsibility to share this history and make what reparations I could.  

And so I ask you this Yom Kippur: Where is shame showing up in your life? Is it tied to something you’ve done? Something your people have done? Something you carry that isn’t even yours, but feels like yours? And more importantly — what would it look like to face that shame, not with denial, but with curiosity? With compassion? With a yearning to return to God, to your purpose, to your best self?  

We feel shame because we care. Because we are proud. Because we hold ourselves to a certain moral standard.  Because we know we’re bound together.

That is what we bring to this day. Our Torah reading from Leviticus 16 tells us of the High Priest, who offers atonement not only for himself, but for his household and for all the people of Israel. Even our ancestors knew that sin—and shame—are collective, as I spoke about last night. But so is healing.

Yom Kippur teaches us that who we are is never beyond repair. 

As Deuteronomy 10:16 says: “Umaltem et orlat l’vavchem – Cut away the thickening around your hearts.”  

Let your heart feel. 

Let your heart break.  

Let your heart be known. 

And let your heart guide you home.

Gmar chatima tovah – May you be inscribed for a good new year.

There’s a story Rabbi David Woznica tells about Yom Kippur when he was a child. His parents, with all good intentions, explained that during the Vidui — the confessional prayer — you’re supposed to strike your chest only for the sins you actually committed.

So, each year, with the Mahzor in hand, he would go down the list:
“We have sinned against You by speaking recklessly” — yes, did that.
“We have sinned through bribery” — nope, not me.
“We have sinned through arrogance” — okay, maybe a little.
“We have sinned through impure thoughts” — yeah… definitely a few of those.

And so it went, a kind of personal moral inventory, careful and honest.

Then one year, he attended a more traditional synagogue. And during the Vidui, as usual, he was judiciously striking his chest when appropriate. But then… he noticed something strange.

The guy next to him was hitting his chest on every single line.  And then — the guy on the other side too!  And in front of him — and behind him — everyone was doing it!

He began to think: What kind of people go to this synagogue?! Are they all that bad?

Slowly, it dawned on him that perhaps he didn’t have an accurate understanding of what this prayer, this ritual of beating one’s heart, is about.  

This story made me wonder how many of us really do have a deep understanding of Vidui, our communal confessional.  Did you know that someone who is present in synagogue for the entirety of Yom Kippur and participates in the Vidui every time it is recited, and strikes their heart every time that it is traditional to do so, will end up striking their heart 660 times? That is a lot of heart-striking.  No wonder Jewish tradition gets the reputation for being really focused on guilt!

(Though I should note parenthetically: my sense is that you are much more likely to think that Judaism is all about guilt if you only come to synagogue on Yom Kippur.  Because Yom Kippur really DOES focus on guilt.  But if you came to synagogue only on Tu Bishvat, you would think that Judaism is all about environmental consciousness.  If you came to synagogue only on Purim you would think that Judaism is all about partying and drinking.  Each Jewish holiday has its own themes, and you get the full emotional spectrum and full experience of Jewish values only if you experience the entire holiday cycle.)

So, why do we say “we” when so many of the sins on that list are not ours? This is a deeply Jewish question. It touches something essential about what it means to stand in a room like this, on a night like this, and pray together.

We know that teshuvah — repentance — is, in many ways, a personal process. The great medieval sage, Maimonides, teaches that there are steps to the teshivah process, requiring introspection, remorse, then confession, and lastly, a commitment not to repeat the mistake.

And yet, every time we confess our sins on Yom Kippur, we say “We have sinned.” Not “I.” Not “they.” But we.  

We may have heard that Yom Kippur comes to atone for all the wrongs that we haven’t been able to repent for, whether it is because we haven’t had time to, so because the other person wasn’t interested in hearing our apology, or because the only person we hurt was ourselves.  Perhaps this was a sin of omission, something we could have done but didn’t. Yom Kippur is our way of acknowledging the burden of all those misdeeds, and making ourselves accountable to a compassionate, forgiving, yet all-seeing God.

But there is more to Yom Kippur, clearly.  Why are we also atoning for sins we haven’t done?  Isn’t this like collective punishment?  Haven’t we enough to feel guilty about, to punish ourselves for?  

In Judaism, we recognize there is something beyond individual sin – there are societal and communal and institutional wrongs, sins that we permit or overlook in others, sins of prior generations that stain our present.  These may require communal recognition and apology. 

Yes, I am talking about reparations, which is incredibly complex to understand, discuss, and undertake.  What I want to say about that, simply, is that Judaism has ancient mechanisms for reflecting on and addressing the sins of the past, sins we ourselves didn’t commit, but which continue to shape our lives and our world currently.  This is how it began, in Leviticus 16:17: “Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness through a designated agent.”

We will be reading this verse tomorrow, from a Torah portion concerning the scapegoat.  This text acknowledges that at times our collective sins are too much to bear alone.  It offers us release, albeit at the expense of an innocent goat.  It is important to say that even though this ritual  employs a scapegoat, it is not a way of bypassing responsibility – the people and their leader are committed to doing teshuvah – recognizing and regretting our collective sin, ceasing from wrongdoing, and committing not to repeat it again. 

But sometimes that is not enough, especially with communal sins.  We need that release – and that is where Yom Kippur comes in.  We no longer have a High Priest, or a Temple, or a scapegoat, for that matter, but we do have Yom Kippur.  And we do have each other.  

My teacher from rabbinical school, Rabbi David Teutsch, who is also the editor of the Kol haNeshama prayerbooks that we use here at Kol Emet, writes concerning communal sin: “Sometimes, sins…entail complicity across an entire community.” Perhaps something was said or done, in a communal setting at Kol Emet, that went against our standards and values, but nobody said anything.  Perhaps we were being polite.  Perhaps we did not know what to say at the time.  When that happens, who is to blame?  Rabbi Teutsch says, “Another function of communal confession is its emphatic statement of behaviors the community considers unacceptable. We can understand this as a general form of admonition, by which the community proclaims its expectations to its members. “We” affirm the standards of our community together.”

I love the idea that when we are beating our breast and saying “We have sinned…” that we are stating all in an exhaustive way, publicly, communally, loudly, what we disavow, what we stand against.  And in so doing, we are also stating, in a way, what we stand for and what we strive for.

What we do and permit in shul, or anywhere, for that matter, has repercussions and reverberations far beyond our immediate circumstances.  The idea isn’t that everyone committed every sin, but that the community as a whole bore responsibility. Silence when someone should have spoken. Systems that allowed harm. Habits we inherited but never questioned. In our tradition, the moral weight of the world is shared. One act can move the world toward healing or toward harm.

In tractate Kiddushin 40b, Rabbi Elazar Ben Shimon says, “If a person performs one mitzvah, they tip the scale toward righteousness — not just for themselves, but for the entire world. But if they commit one sin, they tip the scale toward guilt — again, not just for themselves, but for everyone.” 

We have so much power to make change, so much more agency than we realize!  The irony here is that we have to have the humility to see the ways in which we have avoided acknowledging and accepting responsibility.  

Karle Wilson Baker’s poem “Pronouns,” beautifully points to this:

O God, You said,
“Say, ‘We’”;
But I shook my head,
Hid my hands tight behind my back, and said,
Stubbornly, “I.”
Again You said, “Say, ‘We’”;
But I looked upon them, grimy and all awry.
Myself in those twisted shapes? Ah, no!
Distastefully I turned my head away,
Persisting, “They.”
Again You said, “Say, ‘We’”;
And I
At last,
Richer by a hoard of years,
Looked in their eyes and found the heavy word
That bent my neck and bowed my head:
Like a shamed school child then I mumbled low,
“We, O God.”

We are here together tonight, drawn together as a community of support, to be vulnerable, to confess our sins and shortcomings, to find God’s compassion and patience and mercy in the eyes of the other.  For not one of us is perfect, and in that shared recognition of our humanity is our strength.  Teshuvah may be an individual process, but it is not a solitary one.  

Over the course of this Yoma, the sacred day, we strike our hearts not once, not ten times, but hundreds of times. Not because we are personally guilty of every sin — but because someone among us is. And that makes it ours too.

Rabbi Seth Goldstein, my colleague and friend who is a congregational rabbi and creates TikToks in Olympia, Washington, shares a beautiful teaching about the Kol Nidre prayer, which tips off our Yom Kippur observance.  He writes, “Just prior to Kol Nidre, we chant the b’yeshiva shel maalah, which declares that with the permission of the heavens and of our congregation, sinners are permitted to pray with the rest of the congregation. Our Reconstructionist machzor renders it quite beautifully: “We accept into our midst whoever seeks to pray, whether righteous or unrighteous, all shall pray as one community.” The irony of these words is that we are all both righteous and unrighteous.”

With those words, we entered this most solemn and holy day together, convening a holy court above and a holy court below, we draw together to love and accept one another, as we are, as is.  The power of this moment is not just that God permits us to pray together, but that we permit it — we must accept one another.

And that’s not easy in a time like this. These past two years have been filled with heartbreak and anger — over the horrors of the war in Israel and Gaza, global antisemitism, the rise of authoritarianism, fracturing within our own Jewish community.

It seems like everyone has a different definition of who is “righteous” and who is “unrighteous.”

But Yom Kippur reminds us that we all come with broken hearts. We all carry grief, regret, confusion, hope. We all strike our chests. We all say “we.”

We humbly return to saying “We” because we are bound up with one another, whether we like it or not. Because communal sins exist: not just what I did, but what we allowed. Because silence can be complicity. Because our prayer is also a public statement of values — “We affirm that this is wrong. We affirm that we can do better.”

Collective teshuvah doesn’t mean we lose our individuality. It means we recognize our interconnectedness. That healing the world — tikkun olam — isn’t a solo act. It’s something we do together.

On Yom Kippur, we become a people again — confessing, forgiving, growing, together.

And so tonight, like that child in Rabbi Woznica’s story, we may look around and wonder: What kind of people are we?

And I hope the answer is: we are people who are brave enough to say — “We, O God.”

Sermon for Rosh haShana Day 1 5786

As a little girl, I was never into princesses or royalty.  Now, as an adult, I’ve found myself more interested in them than I’d care to admit.  I’ve been following Princess Catherine’s cancer diagnosis, observing King Charles’ style of leadership as he assumes the throne in his later years, and for years I was hooked on The Crown, a fictional docudrama that chronicled six decades of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. I’ve found it fascinating how the show portrays her not only as a private individual but as a powerful female leader.

What strikes me about the labels and titles we assign each other – Doctor, Rabbi, President, Queen – simultaneously give us a place in society, yet also limit us.  We all have certain associations with these labels and project certain expectations onto these leaders.

Today, as we gather to celebrate Rosh haShanah, we reflect on the particular title we assign to God, particularly on this day: Melekh—King.  It’s a title that is both powerful and, in many ways, problematic.

Kings are often larger-than-life figures, representing ideals of grace, beauty, power, might, or wisdom. Think of King Arthur, or the regal figures from fairy tales and Disney movies. 

But real-life kings?  Anyone with a knowledge of history would associate monarchies more with tyranny, greed, incompetence, dehumanization and mass servitude. Here in the United States, we were founded on an outright rejection of kingship and all it represents.  Thomas Jefferson described it bluntly in his 1788 letter to George Washington, as he described what he was witnessing during his travels in Europe:  “There is scarcely an evil known in these countries which may not be traced to their king as its source.”

Another founding father, Thomas Paine, who wrote the deeply influential pamphlet “Common Sense” which boldly declared that “monarchy and succession have laid (not this or that kingdom only) but the world in blood and ashes. ‘Tis a form of government which the word of God bears testimony against, and blood will attend it.”  

From where did he derive this radical claim?  By drawing on the teachings of the Bible, of course; specifically 1 Samuel, where the Israelites demand a human king, and Samuel warns them of the consequences. Samuel describes the king’s future abuses, from conscripting sons and daughters to taking a portion of their crops and flocks, leading to oppression and dehumanization. He warns them that this king “will take a tenth part of your flocks, and you shall become his slaves. The day will come when you cry out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen; and YHWH will not answer you on that day.” (1 Sam 8:12-18)

Samuel based his views on the book of Deuteronomy, which permits kings but imposes clear limitations on their power. Further, Deuteronomy states that a king must have a copy of the Torah with him all the time, to be read constantly, so that he may remain humble, governed by the laws of God, and never act with arrogance or greed. (Deut. 17:14-20)

So it’s abundantly clear: From our beginnings, we Jews have never been fans of monarchies.  And yet, the metaphor of God as King dominates our liturgy during the High Holidays, particularly on Rosh haShanah.

On Rosh haShanah morning, we begin by announcing the presence of “haMelekh” – the King. We recite “Avinu Malkenu“—”Our Father, Our King.” This is not a small or simple metaphor.

During these holy, awesome days, we acknowledge how much is out of our control. The image of a king, with absolute power, may be a way to impress upon us the enormity of God’s sovereignty. We are vulnerable, mortal, and limited—sickness, age, and death are all around us. Perhaps calling God King reminds us of God’s total power and the trust we place in God’s eternal perspective.

But the metaphor of God as King is not without its limitations. It is, after all, an antiquated, gendered, and hierarchical image. Kings sit on thrones in palaces, distanced from the people, symbolizing a system where power is not shared but dictated from above. In this way, the king is less approachable, less of a partner, and more a figurehead of hierarchy.

So, why then would we call God King? How did we come to call God King?

There is almost no mention of God as King in the Torah. Our patriarchs and matriarchs never called God King.  Instead, in the story of the Exodus, God is depicted as the antithesis of Pharaoh —a ruler not bound by mortality, cruelty, or tyranny.  Later, in the wilderness, the people of Israel build God a tabernacle, not a palace.

But obviously somewhere along the line we evolved in our terminology.  The word Melekh is all over our siddur. The basic formula of our prayers starts, “Baruch Ata Adonai Eloheinu MELEKH ha’olam.”  By the time of the Babylonian Talmud, which was compiled around 500-700CE, the tractate Rosh HaShana (16a) tells us, “Recite before Me verses of sovereignty for Rosh HaShana so that you make me King over you.”

So, what changed?  In a word: EXILE.  

The Babylonian exile was a formative and traumatic experience for the Jewish people during which many people from the Kingdom of Judah were forcibly deported to Babylon after the Babylonian Empire, under King Nebuchadnezzar II, conquered Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE. Foreigners in a strange new land, the exiles sang, “By the rivers of Babylon, we wept, as we remembered Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (Ps. 137)  

How does a people who has been displaced and dispersed stay connected, both physically and spiritually? 

The answer: They assert that their God is not only the object of their prayers, but also that God is the King of an Israelite nation that is one and connected beyond time and space, unlimited by physical borders. This, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks explains, is “the single most astonishing ­phenomenon of Jewish history, the fact that Jews retained their identity as a nation for two thousand years in exile, scattered across the world.” 

You could argue that this idea was what sustained Jews through centuries of exile and persecution. No matter where we lived, we were connected as people through this kind of theocracy, with our synagogues as spiritual embassies, Jewish strongholds where God was sovereign. We would, as citizens and subjects of whatever country we lived in, obey that country’s laws, as clearly stipulated several times in the Talmud [see the concept of dina d’malkhuta dina], but we would bow only to God. 

The Aleinu prayer, originally a unique part of the Rosh haShanah liturgy, reflects this vision of a world ruled by God. On Rosh haShanah, we proclaim the Great Aleinu as a kind of coronation ritual, affirming that God, not any earthly monarch, is the true King.

This notion was so powerful that we took the Aleinu, which was originally recited once a year to crown our King at the head of the year, and made it part of our daily prayers. It became the spiritual punctuation mark at the end of each service—a way of reaffirming our highest vision of a world ruled not by fear, but by compassion and justice.

The Aleinu prayer is a vision of a world under God’s rule, when “all the world’s inhabitants will realize and know that to You every knee must bow.”  In our vision, God rules not as a tyrannical despotic king, but as a benevolent redeemer and caretaker. Albeit overqualified, God has the added benefit that we need not worry about succession for eternity. 

Even today, when we live in a time of relative safety and prosperity compared to generations past, we still need that reminder. We still need to declare God’s kingship—not to elevate God, but to hold ourselves accountable to Godly values.

But, here lies the tension: If God is King, then no other being can claim that title. This idea has political implications, as it challenges the legitimacy of any earthly ruler. As the prominent Israeli scholar of Jewish thought and ethics, Moshe Halbertal, put succinctly: “God is King; therefore, the king is not God.”

When we use the metaphor of King for God, it does not mean that we like kings.  Rather, it is a repudiation of any human claiming that right. You could say that Rosh haShana was the original “No Kings” demonstration! 

This could get us in trouble, and it has. What is our religious identity versus national identity?  In our history, Jews have been persecuted on the premise that we are outsiders, even threats, and not true and loyal to the country in which we reside. Our allegiances have been questioned; our loyalty has been met with suspicion.  

But this is partly why Jews have felt so comfortable in the U.S. up until now.  We shared the same wariness of kings and those with absolute power with those who founded this country. Thomas Paine, the founding father I previously mentioned, wrote in 1894: “But where, say some, is the King of America? I’ll tell you, friend, he reigns above.” 

Indeed, where is our King, today?  When the vulnerable are attacked, arrested, and displaced instead of protected—can we truly say that justice reigns? Where is our King when cities are threatened and occupied, when leaders stir division and fear instead of offering help?  (I could go on and on.)

From a Jewish perspective, these are not only political questions— they are spiritual ones. Because if we believe God is King, then today we recommit ourselves to God’s kingship: where dignity, mercy, and righteousness rule supreme and are made manifest. 

The Great Aleinu coronation ritual does more than that: The medieval sages coined the idea “Ein melekh b’lo am – There is no king without a people.”  The implication here is that one cannot be a ruler if there is no people to reign over.  THe Chasidim of the 18th century took it further, stating that there can be no King if there is noone with Him. One cannot be a monarch over trees and rocks.  One cannot be monarch simply by owning a lot of physical possessions.  In order to be King, God needs a people, and God needs us as His partners.

It is a poignant image.  There is a beautiful metaphor that comes from chassidic teachings that during the month of Elul, which precedes the High Holidays, “the King in the field,” meaning that God is more accessible to us at this time of year.  Imagine a king who usually lives in a royal palace, far removed from the everyday people. To meet him, you’d need an appointment, dress properly, and go through guards and protocol.  But once a year, the king goes out into the field — into the open, among the people — and anyone can approach him. 

Lovely, yes, but why would God go out into the field?  Perhaps because the high and lofty King is searching for us.  We are God’s subjects, yes, but also are God’s creation.  Like is calling to like.  As the New Year approaches, God needs us. God searches for us.

We are created in God’s image, inherently holy, and our task on Rosh haShanah is to rediscover that godliness—the “king,” if you will, within each of us.

There is a midrash that teaches that when a human king mints coins with his image, they are all the same. But when the King of Kings mints coins, all bearing his image, each one is unique. (Sanhedrin 38a) While a human king’s treasure is his wealth, God’s treasure is each one of us. God’s sacred image is stamped within every human being.

So what does it mean for us to crown God as King today? It means standing up for the divine image in every human being—regardless of faith, background, race, gender, or nationality. It means building a world where power serves justice, not self-interest. Where compassion and love for our shared humanity guides our laws and our actions.

The liturgy on this most sacred day calls us to affirm God as the true King, the only true King.  While human leaders rise and fall in power, ours is Eternal. While human rulers issue orders from their inner sanctum and prey on the vulnerable – the poor, the stranger, the orphan and the widow – in order to feel powerful, our King’s power lies in compassion and in partnership with us.  

Our God gives voice to the voiceless, an aspect we celebrate in the themes of our Torah and Haftarah readings today as we hear Hagar’s cry and Hannah’s prayer.  Our King sees each one of us in our distress and lifts us up and clothes us in dignity.  Our God shows us the path forward, not dictating by executive order, but through acts of kindness and justice, through mitzvot that remind us of our responsibility to one another, our interdependence and connection with each other as God’s treasured creation.

Because to recognize God’s kingship is not to abdicate responsibility. It is to embrace it. God’s sovereignty does not diminish our agency—it calls it forth. 

HaMelekh! The King is here. Not in a palace or a far-off throne—but in this sanctuary, in our hearts, and in the work ahead.

Shanah Tovah.

Erev Rosh Hashanah Talk 5786

We gather here today at the start of a new year — Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world. It’s a Day of Judgment, yes — but also a day of creation, of beginnings, and above all: a day of hope. 

Hope is a word I’ve been pondering a lot lately.  I’ve been thinking about where we find hope, what gives us hope, especially in the times we are living in today.

What is hope?  Well, if you ask my puppy Kevin, hope is found in children dropping microscopic crumbs of food on our kitchen floor.  Hope is the determination found behind his pleading puppy dog eyes that even though we never give him human food, this will be the meal when we will finally be overwhelmed by his cuteness and cave.  

We adopted Kevin this spring. He is a blue heeler mix who came from a kill shelter in Arkansas.  He has a brown patch over one eye, and giant ears, one of which is “broken” and bends. We say that we got Kevin because our 4-year-old dog Mac needed a brother, which is true.  But deep down, I know we rescued Kevin because we needed rescuing ourselves.  We needed hope. 

I don’t know about you, but life turned upside down for me in January.  To say that I am worried about the state of democracy in our country is an understatement.  Things like free speech, the rule of law, are not things we can assume anymore…. It is devastating to read the headlines sometimes, to wonder how to do more to protect the vulnerable.  

There is so much fear and division, and our leaders seem to thrive off of them.  This is the tactic: distract and overwhelm.  I’ve noticed I have to force myself to turn on the news; I can only take so much.

The noted Black poet, novelist, and playwright Langston Hughes wrote, “Hold fast to dreams/For if dreams die/Life is a broken-winged bird/That cannot fly.//Hold fast to dreams/For when dreams go/Life is a barren field/Frozen with snow.”  I used to sing it as a song in my high school youth group, not really thinking about its meaning very deeply.  But it’s so true.  We need dreams like we need air. Our dreams and hopes, big and small, conscious and unconscious, shape our daily lives and direct our steps.  They are literally why we get up every day.  

Unless you are my husband Josh.  In his case, Kevin is why he gets up every morning.  

Rosh haShanah comes to wake us up, not unlike Kevin, to ask us, “What gets you up in the morning?” “What gives you hope?” “What do you have to look forward to?”  What gives you life?” and importantly – “Are you living your life in such a way that you are living into your purpose, your dreams, your highest values, your hope?” 

It seems to me that we measure hope differently depending on the circumstances.  When things are good, we are filled with hope and optimism, like a balloon.  We don’t need to work on it.  When things are challenging and disencouraging, hope is something we need to actively cultivate.  If it seems there is nothing to look forward to, then we need to find those things. 

On Rosh Hashanah we say “Hayom Harat Olam — Today the world is born.” Today we start anew, today the world is washed clean of its disappointments and brokenness.  Today we see the world like a puppy – full of possibility and discoveries and treats.  

We know that tomorrow morning, in many ways, we will wake up to a world that is much like it was the day before, but Rosh haShanah comes to remind us that each day is a gift. Each day is full of infinite possibility. And we are responsible for bringing that promise into reality.

Tomorrow, we will hear the shofar — raw, piercing, and wordless. It’s not polished music. It doesn’t come with lyrics or explanations. And yet, somehow, it reaches deep into the soul. It is a wake up call to our lives, calling us to realize the ways we’ve fallen asleep at the wheel, how we have become stultified and frozen, numb to our brokenness, and gotten accustomed to the awful, unbelievable headlines on the news.  We shrug our shoulders, scroll past them, because what can we do?

The tradition holds that there is always something we can do.  No action is too small. And, it is never too late. The shofar is both a cry of brokenness, and it is also a call of the greatest optimism, a challenge for hope to rise from that brokenness.

People often ask how we got Kevin’s name.  The simple answer is that Josh likes to give his pets somewhat ridiculous human names.  But the name Kevin came from one of my favorite movies.  (No, not Home Alone!)  It’s a Pixar movie from 2009 called Up.  The film centers on an elderly widower named Carl Fredricksen who travels to South America in order to fulfill a promise that he made to his late wife. His plan is to turn his house into a giant hot air balloon and fly there.  But this scheme is unwittingly hijacked by an enterprising young Boy Scout named Russell. Together, they manage to fly – and land! – the house in their tropical jungle destination, where they befriend a talking dog named Doug.  (This was Josh’s original choice of name, but sadly it was vetoed by the girls.)  They also meet a cheerful, goofy, colorful bird and encounter Carl’s childhood idol, who, it is revealed, has sinister plans to capture that bird –  who we come to realize is a rare, exotic bird. Well, that bird is named Kevin. Kevin, as it happens, turns out to be a female and a mother of baby birds.  

Now you are probably wondering what this has to do with hope.  Carl the widower has given up on life. His wife died, and with her, his hope.  They had a dream to travel to this particular destination, and now it would never be fulfilled.  He would get there, yes, but only because he wanted to escape. He lived for the past and only in his memories.  Only when all his plans go sideways does he eventually see that there is a purpose in his present, something to hope for and to fight for.  

I cry every time I see this movie.  Carl’s love for his wife is so beautiful, and when she dies, I wonder how any of us in his place would be able to go on.  But sometimes, it is only when someone or something dies or is under threat, do we realize how much we love it.  

Like this country – I never realized how much of my hopes, dreams and identity was tied up in the fabric of this nation.  I took democracy and certain freedoms for granted, until, like Kevin the exotic bird, they became endangered. Hope is indeed a broken winged bird that cannot fly.

Hope is the most precious thing.  It is as common as air, and just as essential.  And when we get the air knocked out of us, it will take us a minute to get back up again, but we do.  How is because of hope, whether we call it that or not.  And why is because of teshuvah.  Teshuvah is often translated as “repentance,” but really, it means return.

Return to what? Return to your truest self.  Return to the person you know you can be. Return to hope.  Return to believe there is a future for you.  Return to the belief that there is a place for you, and a purpose.

Teshuvah says: You are never stuck. You are never too far gone. Change is possible if you don’t retreat from it. Hope is real.  Even if the person you shared those hopes and dreams with is gone, you are still here.  Even if the country you believed in is crumbling, there is still a place for you, and it’s your responsibility to find it.

Teshuvah says: That time is now.  Every day matters.  You matter. 

These are called the Days of Awe, because the truth is that the work of teshuvah is daunting.  It is no small task.  But we are reminded:  You are not doing it alone.  

There is a teaching, a midrash from Shir HaShirim Rabbah 5:2 (a commentary on the Song of Songs) that says: “God said to Israel: Open for Me a tiny opening like the eye of a needle, and I will open for you an opening wide enough for wagons to pass through.”

What a powerful image.  God doesn’t ask for you to make the whole journey — just take the first step. We just need to have just the tiniest crack of willingness. Just a sliver of hope.

It is traditional to recite Psalm 27 every day of Elul and into the 10 days of repentance, through Yom Kippur.  It concludes, “Hope in the Eternal. Be strong, have a heart of courage, and hope in the Eternal! 

Hope is not naïve. Hope is courage. It takes courage to believe that tomorrow can be better than today, especially when you are not a puppy and you’ve been disappointed and challenged time and again. It takes a heart of courage to believe that you can be better than you were yesterday. That the world, with all its brokenness, can still be redeemed.

This Rosh Hashanah, may we have the courage and the heart to hear the sound of the shofar not just as a cry — but as a call to return, a call to begin again, a call to hope.Shanah Tovah U’Metukah — may it be a sweet, good, and hopeful new year for all of us.

This is my love letter to you.  I think you need one.  We all need one. I need one.  

This has been an incredibly bruising year to be Jew, no matter what your politics or your feelings about Israel.  October 7 was devastating, not only because of the immense scale of the attacks, the incredible loss of life, and dysfunction and divisions in Israel that allowed such a shocking breach of security to happen. And not only because of the war that began, first in retaliation for the attacks and is now so much more.  We have so much grief and fear and confusion, and so many questions.  We are wrestling with the various attitudes about Israel within our community, to the point where some of us wonder if we have a place within the community.  All this would be more than enough, so much more than enough.

But there is a secondary war we have had to wage concurrently, happening mostly outside of Israel, and that is the war being conducted on social media, on college campuses, and in the mainstream media.  It’s more than a war of propaganda and disinformation, it’s a war of language and semantics.  I remember, early on, innocently and respectfully questioning a Facebook “friend’s” (someone I know in real life) use of the word genocide with regard to the terrible number of civilians and children being killed in Gaza as Israel deepened its ground incursion. I was unprepared for the attack. People I didn’t know jumped in, leveling accussions at me, telling me as a Jew that I needed to “do better.”

That was just one incident.  I quickly retreated – deleting my comment, blocking that so-called friend, who had noticeably stayed silent. I share this with you, because you probably have your own version of such an incident.  Since then, I muted Facebook and other social media, though I still check it.  But now I am much more careful about posting details of my life and my thoughts about the news. I am now more cautious in general about who I call a “friend.”

We were all unprepared to deal with the level of vitriol, the breathtaking assumptions based in willful ignorance, and the chasms of difference that would open within our communities, our families, and ourselves.  As I stated in my sermon one year ago on Yom Kippur, we haven’t been talking about Israel, we turned away from the complexity and the challenges of Israel being a real and imperfect country. We either made Israel out to be some kind of ideal, or we quietly distanced ourselves from its problems. 

Al chet she’chatanu lifanecha – for the sins we have committed before You by thinking we were supporting Israel by giving it a pass.   For the sins we have committed before You by suppressing diverse views about Israel and Zionism in our communities.  

I spoke about anti-semitism too, saying that the weaker Israel is, and the more divided we are as a people, the more anti-semitism spikes world-wide.  I was unprepared for how right that was.   

Thank God for the return of Jon Stewart.  He had a segment recently about Israel where he pointed out that plenty of Israelis criticize their government, now more than ever, so why shouldn’t we?  Then he does this very Jewish internal dialogue, saying to himself, “But Jon, People are going to see this segment and go, ‘Maybe Israel isn’t perfect, but criticizing them feeds the fire. Don’t you worry about antisemitism?'” And Jon answers himself, “No. I believe antisemitism will be fine. And I gotta say, not for nothing, but from what I’ve experienced, it’s very resilient and it’s not really tied to any event or war or activity or reality.” And then (Jewishly) he questions himself again, wondering aloud “Maybe I’m wrong, maybe the blame the Jews for the Black Death, the Spanish Inquisition, and the space lasers will all go away if Israel does right and peace will reign, and people will no longer baselessly and conveniently blame the Jews when things don’t work out exactly the way they want them to.” He then cuts to a clip of Trump saying, “This is the most important election in the history of the United States. In my opinion the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I’m at 40%.” 

Permit me to state the obvious – none of this is our fault.  If an election goes one way or another, it is not the fault of a teeny religious minority that makes up 2% of the US population. It is not our responsibility to educate our friends and co-workers, or teachers and administrators in our kids’ schools and colleges, or even strangers on social media. Anti-semitism is not your fault. Israel’s cirises are not your fault, and it is the definition of anti-Semitism to say that it is.

A colleague of mine, Rabbi Nina Mandel, noted recently that as she was preparing memorials for 9/11 and 10/7, much was the same in the planning process, yet the expectations were far different.  She wrote, “For Oct 7, I have to be ready to defend the legitimacy of mourning a terrorist attack that upended the lives of Israelis and Jews around the world and in one day killed and imperiled so many innocent lives. I have to explain that mourning these deaths does not mean celebrating the deaths of thousands in Gaza, or condoning the actions of the Israeli government. I have to defend my right, as a Jew, to, on this day, simply mourn the death of other Jews.”

It is simply too much.  So I want to say to you, this Yom Kippur, it is not your fault. You are not responsible for carrying it all.  This Yom Kippur, we may tap our fists to our hearts in our confessionals, but the message isn’t “Do better.” This year, the message “Release it all. It’s ok not to know the answer, and it’s ok to be wrong. It’s okay to cry for Palestinians in Gaza, and it’s okay to feel a sense of loyalty to your people.  It’s not your fault.”

The cognitive dissonance is real.  Before October 7 I thought I knew where I stood. I’ve always considered myself a pro-peace, progressive Jew who champions human rights, co-existence, and interfaith social justice efforts.  After October 7, I’ve felt more defensive and protective of “my tribe” than ever before.  But as the war drags on and expands, I feel more and more conflicted. 

I worry that October 7 has changed us, and not for the better. I have retreated from much of my interfaith work, because of the ignorance, false equivalences, and most of all, the silence of many of my local clergy colleagues.  Most recently, the Newtown Yardley ministerium, our local interfaith clergy organization, decided to hold its monthly meeting on the first day of Rosh haShanah.  They did so knowingly, and refused to reschedule. To make matters worse, nowhere on their agenda was any mention of the anniversary of October 7.  There is obviously more to this story, but I assure you, the more you know, the more questions you will have.

I tell myself that right now, it is most important to build up and strengthen the Jewish community.  As I’ve often taught, from Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, Rabbi Hillel says, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” 

But Hillel continues, “If I am only for myself, what am I?” I can’t lose hope that peace is achievable, that Israelis and Palestinians can co-exist.  The mishnah’s third line, “And if not now, when?” reminds me of the urgency in all this brokenness: Peace and coexistence will not happen without my recommitment to rebuild relationships and forge new ones.  The interfaith friendships I have maintained are more precious and important than ever.  We somehow need to find our way back out there, even though it feels much safer to stay in Jewish spaces.

But we Jews have to reckon with ourselves as well.  Whenever I hear us referring to terrorists as animals, I cringe.  Animals would never have done what they did.  But I can’t tolerate any human being, no matter how reprehensible their views, being characterized as less than human. We have to reckon with the fact that humans, all of us, of every creed, have a real capacity for evil.  It begins when we don’t see or dismiss the humanity of the other.

When I went to Israel earlier this year as part of the Venture Israel Education fellowship, our group met with diverse individuals and groups across Israeli society.  In East Jerusalem we met with a Palestinian bookstore owner. He told us, “What happened on October 7 did not happen in Jerusalem, or Haifa, or the North.  It is not happenstance that the violence came out of Gaza, when the walls are higher and the separation of Israeli and Palestinians is more complete.” He told us that when we deal with threats of violence by erecting barriers so we can’t see or interact with one another, this is not making peace. And, in the long run, it actually makes us more unsafe.

We can say, “War is hell,” and we can have very reasonable explanations for why Israel needed to carry out a particular strike or why Israel is justified in defending itself, but that does not absolve us.  While my concern is primarily with Israel and my people, I am gravely concerned about the plight of all the people in Gaza.  Nobody deserves to live in such a hell, and there is no humane justification for it.  

As a rabbi, my greatest fear since October 7 is that we lose our sense of humanity and forget what is at the heart of Judaism and who we are as Jews. We cannot allow the horrors of war make us calloused or indifferent, resigned to blame the other side or dwell in anger or hate. We are ultimately responsible to one another, still even more so than ever. While we can be forgiven for retreating in order to grief and heal, we can’t forget that while we are alive we have an incredible capacity to be a force for goodness and healing. This is our ultimate sacred responsibility.  

I have never before resonated so much with the prophet Jonah, who we read about on Yom Kippur afternoon, as much as I do this year.  Jonah is the epitome of the reluctant prophet. Told by God to tell the people of Nineveh of their sins and to beg God’s mercy, he instead shirks his duty and runs away from God.  Or tries to, because can anyone truly run away from God?  My kids could tell you that God is everywhere.  What kind of a silly prophet is he?  He is judgmental of others when they do wrong, and pouts when they then do teshuvah. 

There is an essay about Jonah called “Those who Flee from God” by Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, a Lithuanian scholar and leader who lived in the first half of the 20th century.  I was taught this essay by Rabbi Jill Jacobs, who leads the rabbinic human rights organization called Truah.  In this essay, Rabbi Amiel shares how he too never understood Jonah’s actions until he experienced a similar situation . He came upon a Polish soldier, an enemy, someone he should fear, who is mortally wounded.  Instead of staying with him and perhaps easing his pain in his dying moments, Rabbi Amiel chose to flee, at great risk to himself.  He was so bothered by his reaction: why did he flee? He realized that he fled from having to look into the soldier’s face, from confronting the humanity of his energy, from seeing the face of God in the face of his mortal foe. 

We are always running from God, from seeing God in the face of another.  We skim past the difficult headlines, we scroll past disturbing images – the faces of hostages, Palestinian children in Gaza. We are constantly running away.  But God does not.  God remains with the captive and the persecuted, the voiceless and homeless.  

Like Jonah, we have retreated from our sacred responsibility – for very understandable reasons!  Here we are on Yom Kippur, truly in the belly of the whale, pleading our cause, admitting our failures.  Like Jonah, we

realize that the only way out is by recognizing that there is a Divine Grace and a Mercy and Love that is far greater than what we can perceive.   

That is what Judaism is about, in its essence but also in its most expansive sense.  Judaism is about love. Love beckons us back into relationship with one another and into relationship with God. It calls us to be accountable to each other. It demands that we overcome fear and respect humanity as created in the image of God, especially in the time of war and division. 

Now, you might think, Judaism is about love? Isn’t that the definition of Chrisitanity? Rabbi Shai Held came out with a book last year called “Judaism is About Love.” Its many insights form the basis of this sermon and helped me frame my thinking this difficult year even though it was written mostly before October 7, 2023.  He wrote the book because, as he was teaching Judaism, he was constantly coming up against distortions in the way Judaism is understood that were both perpetuated by Jews and in our wider society.  

At a book signing event I attended last spring, Rabbi Held shared an account of an exchange he had with a group of Protestant high school students many years ago when he was presenting about Judaism to them. These were exemplary students who were chosen to attend this presentation because of their engagement and commitment to the church. During the discussion, as an aside, Rabbi Held asked, “Remind me guys what does Jesus say is the great command?” and they immediately and proudly answer “love of God and love of neighbor.” When Rabbi Held followed up, “And remind me what is Jesus quoting?” Not a single hand went up. In that moment Rabbi Held realized that “this is how a culture can perpetuate a story whereby Judaism is loveless and Jesus comes into the world to fill in something that has been completely absent. These students had no idea what wells Jesus trained from. They didn’t know where he got the love. They didn’t know that Jesus is quoting Leviticus and Deuteronomy.”

In a time of so much hate, fear, hurt and sadness, I feel a sense of urgency to be grounded in a sense of my Judaism that speaks to the fullness of our tradition and the beauty of our spirit and religious values, that makes me truly proud to be Jewish. 

Often, in the US, Judaism has been depicted in narrow, stereotypical ways in popular media.  We laugh at shows that depict our families as neurotic, our synagogues as overly concerned with assimilation, and our spiritual expression as primarily gastronomic, because let’s face it, there’s definitely an element of truth.  As a rabbi, those shows always bugged me, because I know that Jewish experience and expression is far richer and broader than simply “they tried to kill us, let’s eat” or “Never forget.” It’s important that we define Judaism on its own terms and not in defense of how others perceive it or in reaction to our fears or trauma.

What is Judaism at its core? What is our mission in the world?  Our leadership went through a process of rewriting our mission statement and articulating our core values as a community just this past year.  So, is it about social justice? Is it about survival, overcoming the fires of hatred, and choosing life?  Is it about Israel? Is it about community and inclusion? Is it about Torah?  Is it about God?  

I think all those things are key elements, but what ties them together, for me at least, is love. Our tradition explicits tells us to love one another, to love our neighbor as ourselves.  This precept, stated in Leviticus 19:18, Rabbi Akiva called the heart of Torah.  It’s not a truism, a trite nicety, it’s a challenge.  I mean, think about your neighbors, the ones who make noise late at night, whose dog bit your kid, who cut down the tree that was on your property – they are much harder to love than the people down the street. And yet you share a border, and often so much more than that. So you have to figure out how to respect, even love one another, beyond the disagreements and hurts.  

The Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4-9, tells us that we must love God with all our heart, with all our breath, and with all that we have, and that we are commanded to impart that love to our children and remember to act with love when we are in our homes and out on the street.  

Judaism challenges us not to look away, to find God in the face of the stranger. Over and over the Torah tells us since we were once strangers, it is incumbent on us to respond with love to the stranger – meaning, all those on the margins of society – the poor, the immigrant, the widow and the orphan, ethnic, racial, and religious minorities.  Deuteronomy 10:18 and 19 says specifically that God loves the stranger by giving the stranger food and clothing, and so too must we love. Love is what happens when we are awake to the divine recognition of our responsibility to one another. Love is an action. 

We are limited in our capacity to hold in our hearts and consciousness the unique and infinite value of every life stolen from us on October 7, of every hostage taken, of all those killed since the war began, including the hundreds of IDF soldiers, and tens of thousands Palestinian civilians. It is impossible for us to fathom the number of families ripped apart and displaced, much less the wounds and scars people will carry, visible and invisible, for years and years to come. The loss is staggering and mind-numbing.

I have leaned a lot on Psalm 147 this past year, which says in verses 3-5, “The One who heals the broken-hearted and binds their wounds, is the One who numbers the stars and gives each of them a name.” What we humans cannot fathom, God remembers each unique soul with love. It’s an impossible task, really.  But it is a truth we must constantly strive for, according to our ability.

One way to do it is to make it personal, like Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s parents Rachel and Jon did: we focus on one life that we can know with love and that we can have hope of saving in some way. Not only did they look right into the camera so that we could see the pain and love in their eyes, they also shared hundreds of images and stories of their son, who was taken hostage by Hamas, every day on social media so that we could appreciate Hersh’s uniqueness and individuality.  So as I came to know Hersh, I could return to the knowledge that everyone killed, all of them, had a mother, a family, who now will no longer be the same.

Love does not mean being a doormat, or turning the other cheek. Love means sometimes choosing your heart, your truth, your sanity, your dignity, your family, your tribe. Rabbi Held would say that, in the face of all the complexities, contradictions, and hatred in this world, we are capable of choosing what is good and right.  Not that we always do, but we must ultimately return to love.  We are capable of choosing love.

Yom Kippur is centrally about love.  In biblical times, the Holy Temple was the physical symbol of God’s loving presence, where people went to be closest to God.  On Yom Kippur, the day that God is said to be nearer to us than any other time of year, the high priest would enter the Kodash Kodashim, the holiest place in the Temple, and would make atonement for the people.  

Today, the day of Yom Kippur itself takes the place of our Holy Temple.  Our liturgy depicts a loving, compassionate God that forgives where we are unable, who grants us atonement when our shame is too great.  Our sins distance us from God, but on Yom Kippur all our sins are voided, and with it, all the distance between us and our most expansive selves.  

This Yom Kippur may we return most fully to love – love of self, love of community, love of the stranger, love of God.  Let us take all of our pain, our sorrow, our grief, and return to relationship, return to beauty and joy, and return to love.  May we locate our roots in love.

Ken yihi ratzon, May it be so for the well being and healing of all the world.