High Holiday "Greatest Hits" - Yom Kippur 1991

Don't you just miss the High Holidays? For those who just can't get enough, from time to time I'll be featuring here some of my personal favorite all-time "classic" TBE sermons, which I've been archiving online and am releaasing public for the first time. (No, I haven't been storing them in the Disney vault - more like my basement closet, in a box).

This first "Greatest Hit" has been cited fondly often over the years. From Yom Kippur, 1991. "From a Distance" is better known as the "Earth Ball Sermon," because during it we passed around a giant earth ball. The world was a very different place in the fall of 1991 (and so was TBE - this was my last High Holidays sermon as assistant rabbi). Kuwait had just been liberated and the Berlin wall and Soviet Union were no more. Everywhere we looked, there were new possibilities for peace and a new world order. It was truly a "hands on" sermon, as an earth ball was passed around to nearly 2,000 in attendance. (BTW, as an aside, the night before, our new fire alarm had gone off during the Kol Nidre prayer - I made reference to it at the beginning of the sermon).

"From a Distance"

Yom Kippur 1991

"The beautiful intricacy of the human organism is matched only by the equivalent beauty of the organism we inhabit: the system known as earth."





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