Rabbinic Pastor David Daniel Klipper's Rosh Hashanah 1st Night Sermon

Erev Rosh Hashonah Sermon, 5772

I believe this is the fifth year that I’ve been invited to give this sermon, so it’s the fifth year in a row that the first sermon you hear in the New Year is the one delivered by me. Rabbi Hammerman either thinks that I set a good tone for the rest of the year, or else he is looking to make sure that the bar isn’t set too high. But in either case I’m honored to be here and apprecia-tive of the opportunity to share my thoughts with you.

Some of you may know me from Friday night services, in which I play percussion with Cantor Mordecai. Some of you may also know that I work as a chaplain and as someone who trains chaplains at Stamford Hospital. This is a second career for me. I started chaplaincy and spiritual direction training in 2002, and retired from investment banking after 24 years in early 2004. Given that I have chosen to devote my professional life to chaplaincy and training chap-lains, it would be logical to assume that I think that chaplaincy and spiritual care are important – and I do.

And yet I sometimes wonder about my role. Patients often want me to pray for them or give them a blessing, and I’m happy to do so. Yet as I’ve thought about the matter more deeply, I’ve asked myself, ‘What am I really doing when I offer a blessing?’

One of my chaplaincy students helped me focus on this issue. She regularly participated in a monthly Midnight Run in which adults and teenagers distributed food and clothing to home-less people in New York City in the middle of the night. This student was a compassionate and empathic person, and she prayed for the people that she helps. But one day in class, she started to wonder about prayer. She said, “Do I really think that God needs to be reminded by me about the homeless man I just met? Am I seriously saying that God wouldn’t care for that man unless I said my prayer? Of course not. But if God cares for that homeless man regardless of whether I include him in my prayers, then what good do my prayers do?”

It’s an interesting question and it forms the basis of what I want to talk about tonight. What is prayer? What does prayer do? Why do we pray? When Abraham Joshua Heschel was in Selma, Alabama, to march with Martin Luther King Jr. in the struggle for civil rights, he said he was praying with his feet. Sometimes when I’m playing percussion on a Friday night, I feel like I’m praying with my hands. Are these really prayers? If so, what kind of prayers are they?

There are a number of typologies of prayer. There are prayers of love and praise, in which we tell God how wonderful God is or how much we love God. There are prayers of thanksgiving, in which we thank God for something. There are prayers of supplication, in which we are asking God for something. The version of the Amidah that we say on Shabbat, for exam-ple, is different from the one that is said during the week. During the week, there are a number of prayers of supplication in the Amidah. On Shabbat, these prayers are not included, because Shabbat is supposed to be sufficient for us and a day on which we don’t ask God to do more than sustain creation, grant peace, and send healing. Some people separate out prayers of intercession, in which we ask for something from God for someone else, from prayers of supplication. The final type of prayer, which we do a lot during the High Holidays, are prayers of confession, penitential prayers.

Let’s talk about each of these. Prayers of love and praise have to do with our telling God how great God is and how much we care for God. What do we think that does for God?

I know what it does for people. I frequently tell my wife that I love her. I do so because I want her to feel loved and cherished by me. I do so because I know that she, like all of us, can allow another’s perceptions of her to shape how she feels about herself. I want her to feel good about herself because I think she is a wonderful person. But do I think God’s self-perception is a function of what people think? Do I think God needs my love or praise in order to feel good about God’s self? I certainly hope not. That would be a pretty insecure God.

Prayers of thanksgiving seem to me to be somewhat similar to prayers of praise. When my wife does something nice for me, I try to remember her to thank her. Why? Well, it lets her know that I appreciate what she has done, which hopefully makes her feel good and valued. It may be that I’m thanking her for something I hope she will do again, and that is more likely to happen if I thank her than if I don’t. But again, do I think that God needs me to feel good and valued? As I said before, I hope not. Are there things that God is doing for me that I want God to continue? Perhaps, but do I think that God will stop doing them unless I thank God? Do I think I can control God’s behavior by whether I thank God or not? I don’t think so.

What about prayers of supplication or intercession? These are certainly very meaningful for people. We want to be sure that if our loved one is sick, that his or her name is mentioned in the Mi Sheberach prayer of healing. Patients in the hospital often cry when I pray for them. I had a friend who ultimately died of cancer tell me that he felt that the prayers being said on his behalf were at least as important as the chemotherapy he was receiving and if he had to give up one of them he would probably choose to give up the chemo. Clearly, these prayers touch some-thing fundamental in our being.

But what do they touch? Sometimes people feel that they have somehow forfeited the right to be cared about by God because of things they have done. For these people, the fact that someone else would think they were worthy of being prayed for can be very moving. They feel good that I think they are worthy of prayer. But then what is meaningful about the prayer is how I, as a person, feel about them. Or perhaps because I am a chaplain they view me as a proxy for God so my saying a prayer for them gives them a sense that God cares for them. But let’s come back to my student’s question. Do I really believe that God wouldn’t care for them unless I said the prayer? I find that hard to believe. If it was true, it would give me a power that I would feel very uncomfortable about having.

Finally, we get to prayers of confession. One view about confessional prayer is that God needs to know that we feel remorse for what we have done in order to forgive us. Fair enough; I recognize that there may be many people whose conception of God would include the concept of forgiveness being conditional upon repentance and remorse. Clearly, that is consistent with the liturgy of the High Holidays. But why do we need to say the prayer in order to demonstrate our remorse? Do I really think that God doesn’t know I’m remorseful until I say the prayer? Our liturgy says that the High Holidays atone for sins against God, but that for sins against others we have to make amends to them directly. But what if I couldn’t make it to synagogue for the High Holidays? What if I was filled with remorse and had already made amends to the extent I could, but I was sick and in the hospital and so couldn’t come to synagogue to say the right prayers? Do I think that God wouldn’t forgive me because I didn’t say the right words in the right place on the right day? Again, I don’t think so.

And speaking of being in the right place, who says that prayer can only be done in a syn-agogue? While Judaism holds that prayers that require call and response, such as the Mourner’s Kaddish or the Barchu, not be done without a minyan, I don’t think that Judaism holds that a synagogue is the only place there is to pray. In fact, when I’m being a chaplain at the hospital, I sometimes say something about God being as present in the hospital room as in a house of wor-ship and no one has ever disagreed with that statement. No one has ever told me that I shouldn’t be praying in a hospital room but should wait until I was able to be in a synagogue. Indeed, there are teachings that place the Shekhinah (the feminine aspect of God) at the head of every sick-bed.

By now some of you may be thinking that I seem to be a pretty unorthodox chaplain. I’ve basically argued against any of these types of prayer being capable of changing God’s mind or behavior, and I’ve talked about how one doesn’t have to be in a synagogue to pray. So what am I doing up here at the start of the High Holidays, in a synagogue, in which we are and will be saying many prayers?

Let me digress for a moment. I’d like each of you to do a little thought experiment. Spe-cifically, I’d like each of you to imagine a time when you experienced a sense of holiness. By holiness I am not necessarily talking about something religious. It could be a time when you felt a sense of awe at the beauty of life. It could have been characterized by a deep feeling of peace. It may have been a feeling of unqualified acceptance of the world. It was a feeling so deep and so different from ordinary life that the word ‘sacred’ could be used to describe it.

Perhaps you had such an experience here in Temple Beth El. Or it may have been when a child or grandchild was born. Perhaps it resulted from a particularly meaningful and intimate conversation with someone. It could be at a specific spot in nature. I know a woman who had such a feeling of spirituality and connection on a trip to Alaska that she seriously contemplated moving there in the hopes of regaining that feeling. I know for me I sometimes have that feeling in Cape Cod. So you can see that I am defining the word ‘holiness’ broadly. [brief pause]

I’m not going to ask for a show of hands, but I expect that most of you have experienced a sense of holiness at some point in your lives. The specifics of that experience might be unique to each of us, but the experience of having that feeling would not be unique. Indeed, the fact that each of us might have a different experience of holiness demonstrates that the experience of holiness is not restricted to one place, or one time, or one circumstance. Holiness is capable of being experienced in almost any circumstances.

There is a wonderful illustration of this in a book called Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life, written by a rabbi named Alan Lew. In it, he writes about visiting a congregant in Roosevelt Hospital in New York City who was terrified of death and who had been having a very difficult time trying to cope with his imminent death from cancer. As of the day of Rabbi Lew’s visit, this man had been in a coma for four days. This was Rabbi Lew’s experience,

“But on the fourth day, I could see as I came in that he was sitting up in bed. I was shocked. None of his doctors had expected him to come out of this coma. And, as I got closer to his bed, I could see that there was something very strange about him. He seemed to be soaking wet. His bedclothes were completely soaked. It was almost as if someone had hosed him down. It wasn’t until I got to his bedside that I realized what was going on. He was weeping profusely, and he was completely covered in tears.

‘Maury, what’s wrong? Why are you weeping?’ I said.

‘Rabbi,’ he said, ‘four days ago I felt myself slipping into what I was sure would be my final coma. But then this morning I woke up, and now look at this!” With that, Maury swept his arm across the wardroom like a magic wand, and something about his ges-ture allowed me to see precisely what he was seeing. We were in one of those big old hospital wards at Roosevelt, the kind with ten or twelve beds and big vaulting windows. An immense shaft of sunlight was beaming in through one of those windows, and there were dust motes swirling around in the sunbeam like spiral nebulae. Nurses glided noiselessly around the ward like angels. We were in a perfect, radiant world.

Maury held my hand in an iron grip. ‘This is religion,’ he said.”


If you read the mystics—whether they are Jewish (Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev), Sufi (the poet Hafiz), Christian (Meister Eckhart), or Buddhist (Ticht Nhat Hanh)—you will find the same theme, which is that holiness is always with us, within us and around us, in both the profound and the ordinary aspects of life. The trick is to wake up and notice it.

So the answer to the question of what I am doing up here right now, and what I will be doing sitting in the congregation for the remainder of the High Holiday services, is that I am try-ing to be emotionally and spiritually open to the perception of holiness that I know intellectually is all around me. Our High Holiday services, and these ten days of awe are a wake up call. They invite us to acknowledge to ourselves and God all the ways that we have not been fully con-scious, not perceived the holiness in others (and ourselves, for that matter), and so fallen short of being the best person we can be.

So I will now come back to where I started, which is to look at the nature of prayer. Ear-lier I asked, ‘What is prayer? What does prayer do? Why do we pray?’ I don’t think we pray to change God; I think we pray to change us. God is not going to be different because we prayed; but we might.

I think we pray to open ourselves up to holiness. I think we pray to try to access deep acceptance, profound peace. I think patients may be moved when I pray for them because as I pray I am seeking to access that sense of holiness, and perhaps my connection to holiness facili-tates their having that connection as well. Being prayed for can open up a channel between you and God. When that channel opens, it is often incredibly moving. If you think back to the expe-rience of holiness you remembered, I’m sure it was profoundly moving when you experienced it.

So as we start the year 5772, I offer a prayer for each of us. I pray that we are able to use this time of the High Holidays to get right with God and get right with ourselves. May we be given the strength, courage and wisdom to get right with other people. May the prayers we hear and the prayers we say open up our hearts. May we be given a greater facility for expressing love. May we be given the ability to meet difficulties with composure and setbacks with sereni-ty. May our eyes be opened to the beauty of the world and the beauty of one another. May we be able to perceive the holiness present in everyday life, and as a result have our lives be made richer, deeper, and more satisfying. Finally, by accessing the spark of the Divine that lives within each of our hearts, may we be able to experience wholeness, acceptance and deep peace.

Shanah tovah.

Rosh Hashanah Sermons for 5772

Rosh Hashanah Day 1, 5772
The Right Side of History, by Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

FOR AUDIO CLICK HERE (or above)

What a year we’ve just concluded! An earthquake and a hurricane in the same week, and some tornadoes for good measure. A tsunami in Japan with a nuclear catastrophe thrown in, an economic roller coaster like nothing we’ve ever seen. We’ve seen it all this past year, and we thank God to have simply survived it. We are here.

But more than anything else, this past year has been a Year of Engagement, a year when Facebook, Twitter and YouTube single-handedly reshaped the map of the Middle East.

This era of people power is replete with danger, especially for Israel right now, but it is here, and it has every autocrat shuddering in his boots – and even democratically elected leaders are perplexed as to how to deal with it – and how to get themselves on the right side of history - the side of engagement, of courageous people discovering the hidden power of hope.

It is scary right now, but ultimately – and it may take many years – it is a power that promotes human dignity, overcomes fear and shuns hatred and could shape the world for the better. And it is on the march. It is breathing on the streets of Cairo and the shores of Tripoli, the alleyways of Damascus, the avenues of Athens and India and Spain and, yes, over 400,000 strong in the public squares of Israel. And it is so powerful that it rendered bin Laden an irrelevant couch potato even before his era was officially terminated by our Navy Seals. Even parts of the Muslim Brotherhood are beginning to see that in this new era, religious extremism will not stand.

It was fitting that “The Social Network” won the Oscar for Best Picture and that Mark Zuckerberg was Time’s “Person of the Year.” One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account, 800 million users, and they speak 75 languages and spend 700 billion minutes a month pruning their statuses. Every day a “like” button is pushed two billion times and 250 million photos are uploaded. A twelfth of humanity has been weaved into a single network. But the phenomenon is not purely about Facebook or the internet. It is about engagement and what has happened since God said in Genesis chapter 2, on that fateful day in the Garden of Eden, “It is not good for man to be alone.”

This morning I’d like to take a step back and explore further this era of engagement, and what it means for the world and particularly for Israel, and tomorrow I’ll talk about its implications for our community. What are some of the lessons we’ve learned?

We don’t know how things will end up in the Middle East, and it is certain that Israel is in for a bumpy ride, but we also know that three tyrants have been toppled and others are hanging by a thread. Syria has employed all the internet jamming technology that their Iranian allies can provide, this revolution cannot be stopped. And if these tyrants are replaced by other tyrants, another revolution will be spawned and they will fall too. So the first lesson of this Year of Engagement is that oppressive rule will not stand.

But, as I learned this past summer during a trip to Southern Africa, this phenomenon is hardly new.

Our first stop was in Zimbabwe where we stayed in an elegant old hotel in Victoria Falls built during the height of British colonialism. There was something alluring about finding myself suddenly in the middle of a Rudyard Kipling story, sitting on the veranda waiting for someone to bring me my pipe and brandy, a nostalgia for a simpler time, when gentlemen had tea while native servants fawned on them. But ultimately, as any Brit will tell you, those wistful memories dissolve into the final scene of “Brideshead Revisited,” the greatness of the Empire is no more, and we are reminded that regimes built on oppression always crumble.

Even without the help of social networking, they all have – or will. We Jews know it better than anyone. We’ve survived them all. In the past century we’ve seen it with Nazi Germany and the Eastern Bloc – the Soviet Jewry movement in fact helped to set in motion those historical forces that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It has happened in so many other places as well, and it will happen eventually in Iran.

How it comes back to bite us when we enslave another! In today’s Torah reading, Sarah’s Egyptian slave, Hagar, becomes Abraham’s concubine. Yes, back then they treated the Help with even less respect than in Jackson, Mississippi in the early ‘60s. So Hagar, (you can just call her “Aibileen,”) gives birth to Ishmael, and when Sarah is belatedly blessed with Isaac, she doesn’t want to see her little boychick corrupted by this slave child. So Sarah calls on Abraham to banish them both, mother and child. And this troubles Abraham greatly. But God tells him to listen to his wife - and so he banishes Hagar and Ishmael.

Now when you think of it, Ishmael actually got off easy when compared to brother Isaac’s treatment at the hands of his father. Tune in tomorrow. Let’s call it what it is: Abraham was a great leader, but he had a stretch of bad parenting that would have shocked even Casey Anthony (though maybe not her jury). We often question whether all this abuse was truly God’s will. Maybe God didn’t really want Abraham to send Ishmael off or bring Isaac up to the mountain. Maybe these were both tests that Abraham failed.

Because what happens? God hears Ishmael’s cry – that’s what the name Ishmael means – and the slave boy lives and grows up. And then, his descendents, the Ishmaelites, become the merchants who sell Isaac’s grandson Joseph as a slave – in Egypt. Joseph brings his family down and, generations later, THEY TOO are enslaved by the Egyptians. So, if you follow the logic of Genesis, we became slaves in Egypt because of how our ancestor Abraham mistreated his Egyptian slave. A direct connection is drawn. The Torah is brilliant. And the relationship between Israel and Egypt remains complicated to this day. So lesson number one: Oppression invariably fails.

Interestingly, the next time we read about Isaac after the Akeda, he is visiting what appears to be the very same well where God heard the cries of Ishmael and Hagar. A legend has it that Isaac was seeking them out. He now understood the depth of their trauma, having also suffered the consequences of Abraham’s religious extremism, and so he had compassion for them. But they missed connections, and the rest is history. The damage could not be undone.

After Zimbabwe, we went to Johannesburg. One goal of mine during this trip was to better understand Apartheid, partly because I have an insatiable curiosity about the nature of evil. But also, well, we all know – and we heard it most recently last Friday at the UN by none other than President Abbas. Those who seek to delegitimize Israel often try to brand it as the next South Africa, tossing about the term apartheid. This could not be farther from the truth, as in Israel there has been consensus for some time on a two state solution – they do not want to rule over another people and have demonstrated it again and again, and will AGAIN, God willing in a few days, when they accept the Quartet’s formula for peace talks without preconditions.

So we visited Soweto and toured the Apartheid Museum. I had seen “Cry Freedom” and “Invictus” and read some books. But I still didn’t get it. How could an entire nation allow racism to become the law of the land? And, even more amazingly, Apartheid was enacted in 1948, even as the embers of Auschwitz were still smoldering! 1948. How could a nation so knowingly sell its soul to the devil - THEN?

I came up with three reasons:

1) Religious extremism. The Afrikaan leaders saw this as God’s will. It must be pointed out that there were many religious leaders, including Jewish ones, who opposed Apartheid, but others, including prominent Jews, acquiesced. As Yossi Klein Halevi has stated, when people do crazy things in the name of any religion, it is a stain on all religion.

2) Ignorance. In speaking to people in South Africa about their experiences, many claimed not to have had any idea what was really going on. The media was tightly controlled and they just learned not to ask questions.

And finally, 3) Fear. 1948 also marked the beginning of the Cold War and the fear of Communism was a convenient tool for those who sought to limit civil rights for the sake of security. Fear remains a convenient tool to this day, everywhere, and the greatest threat to civil liberties.

But still, it is amazing that an entire nation was able to buy into this evil system and keep Apartheid afloat for a nearly half a century, despite worldwide condemnation, ostracism and isolation.

After visiting Johannesburg, we boarded a plane for the three hour flight to Cape Town. Shortly after takeoff, I was reading some of the material we had bought at the museum and I noticed the guy next to me looking over my shoulder. He was a stocky, youthful 40-something, built like he could have played rugby, back in the day.

Abruptly, even before saying “hello,” he asked me a question:

"Do you think I'm evil?"

So what was I supposed to respond? Uh…“Nice country you got here. How ‘bout them Springboks! Would you like some nuts?” No. I was a captive audience. It was time to engage.

I told him I didn’t think he was evil. I thought that Apartheid was evil and I was trying to understand it. I said that as an American I had nothing to Crow about – in fact we had Jim Crow at the same time you guys had Apartheid. And we had slavery. America has given the world lots of bad things, from Watergate to the KKK those talking dog videos on YouTube.

I looked over but knew that would not make him feel better. Because he was struggling with his past. I was not struggling with mine – though perhaps I should have been. I grew up in the Boston of the 1970s busing crisis, the Boston of Joseph Rakes, who, in that famous news photo, attacked a black attorney with an American flag, using it as a lance, and I was part of a Jewish community that had none too proudly abandoned its roots in Mattapan and Roxbury and its partnerships in the civil rights movement.

The guy, Bernard was his name, said he had known nothing of what was really going on while growing up. History in school ended with the Boer war. He grew up outside Cape Town and rarely saw people different from him. That was by design, as Mara and I realized when we toured a museum in Cape Town’s old District 6, an entire neighborhood that was leveled because the populations were mixing too much.

Bernard did say that Cape Town was much more liberal than other places, which meant, as he explained it, that on the segregated buses, the dividing line was down the middle, rather than front and back. So the blacks could be on the left and the coloreds and whites on the right. How enlightened! I wonder what Rosa Parks would have done.

By the way, in Israel there are now gender segregated buses, along with gender segregated HMO clinics, banks, elevators, grocery stores, pizza parlors and a corner snack shop in the Bukharian quarter of Jerusalem that has a side entrance with a sign marked “women only.” In Beit Shemesh, stones have been thrown at modern Orthodox women while jogging and two women who were taken off a bus recently for not wearing modest enough clothing. Of course, Saudi Arabia, women can’t even drive.

Apartheid began with segregation. Any segregation, including gender segregation, when enforced by public law, leads us down a slippery slope toward discrimination.

Please understand, I am not calling for unisex bathrooms, although I do believe that the woman’s restroom here is much nicer than the men’s – from what I’ve heard. There are boundaries, but what’s happening in Israel now is a serious civil rights issue, fueled, as always and everywhere, by religious extremism, ignorance and fear.

So I sat for 3 hours next to Bernard and I heard his life story. He recalled 1991, in his twenties, and the crowds that lined up to see Nelson Mandela as he emerged from 27 years of incarceration. He soon realized how everything he had heard about this man was a lie and that Mandela was a hero.

No one on this planet is as universally loved as Nelson Mandela. Mediva, as he’s called, turned 93 when we were in Cape Town and on his birthday, every school child in the nation sang a simultaneous “Happy Birthday” to him. With any other leader, it would be scary how much this man is loved. The Jewish community also loves him and recently hosted an exhibit paying tribute to him at the magnificent Cape Town Jewish museum.

When you read about Mandela, when you read his words of love and reconciliation, and when you visit his tiny cell on Robben Island, as we did, you see how easily he could have succumbed to the hatred and the fear. Then you admire how, from his position of strength, as the leader who could have crushed his opposition and driven them into exile, he instead embraced them. It is impossible not to shed a tear on behalf of the man from whom the capacity for tears was ripped away, as his eyes were blinded in the limestone quarries.

Mandela writes in his autobiography, “For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."

When I posted on Facebook how Mandela is so loved, a rabbinic colleague replied, “Too bad he is anti-Israel.” Not true. Mandela has stated, “I cannot conceive of Israel withdrawing if Arab states do not recognize Israel, within secure borders.” And people like that rabbinic colleague are precisely the problem – those who are so quick to label as anti-Israel a person who has lived his entire life promoting human rights. That puts Israel on the wrong side of history. That’s why Israel and the US couldn’t publicly defend Mubarak, no matter how beneficial he was to them. They didn’t want to be seen as opposing democracy and freedom and being on the wrong side of history.

I may not be sure what the right side of history is, but I know that Nelson Mandela is on it – and I want to be there.

I want the Jewish people to be what we’ve always been, the vanguards of justice and compassion. What is the right side of history? We invented it when we crossed the Red Sea, marched through the Wilderness and parked at a rest stop at Mount Sinai. The right side of history loves the stranger. The right side of history is eight lanes apart from playing the victim and has no exit marked “fear.” It is the side that does not allow discrimination and hatred to rule.

I want to be there.

As you already may have guessed, last month, I saw the film, “The Help.” (I think I was the only man in the theater). I loved the movie, as I loved the book, and it reinforced some of the lessons I had taken with me from South Africa. Oppressive political systems might be established by the powerful, but they are lived by the rest of us; not merely by those in the government, but also by those at the Ladies Auxiliary. Discrimination infects all of society, trickling down from top to bottom, it gets into the cracks and nooks and those tough to get at places, where we might tell the Help to give it another shot of Mop ‘N Glo or Windex. This disease is like the breadcrumbs in my car before Pesach – it’s everywhere, and it spreads from one generation to the next, until everyone buys into its toxic lies, even the victims. It plays itself out at the lunch tables of Woolworths and in the bathrooms and the water fountains. It plays itself out wherever someone displays a Confederate flag or tells an ethnic joke.

I, like most Caucasians in the audience, looked to the white character Skeeter to save us. She’s very convenient. She is courageous. We would have done the same, we say. We think. We don’t know.

But enough people did stand up to the hatred to relegate Jim Crowe to the dung heap, that place where all the failed “isms” go, all those doomed experiments in human engineering – the Communisms and Social Darwinisms and fascisms, the ones that end up on the wrong side of history.

Colonialism has failed. Segregation has failed. And now, fear has failed as well.

Until this year, the assumption was that if a government was willing to use lethal force against its own people, it could suppress any grasp at freedom. That was so often true in the 20th century. The Soviet Bloc and Apartheid fell primarily when governments were not willing to do that – and the Chinese stayed in power because they were. But that image of that Chinese protester at Tiananmen Square, the one standing before the tank, was seared into our consciousness – and when that was combined with the power of social networking, which helped people to feel that they were not alone and that their deaths would not be meaningless, that in fact that they could gain immortality, like the innocent martyr of the Iranian street, Neda – something magical happened that changed history. It began to change in Iran two years ago. But this year, we saw it in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya and most astonishingly in Syria. People willing to die for freedom. In olden days people did that because they had the comfort of a strong belief in an afterlife. But now the solitary individual has been empowered by an even stronger belief that we are not alone, that our lives have meaning and that our heroism will live on after us – in that modern Book of Life called YouTube. All you need is a cell phone with a camera and you’ve got a Liberation Movement in the making.

Mark my words, had Tiananmen Square occurred this year, it would still be going on – and the Chinese know it. No one can be more brutal than Assad has been, and he can’t stop it.

In Israel this summer, filmmaker and waitress Daphni Leef set up a protest page on Facebook after she received an eviction notice. Her protest soon gave Israelis a chance to vent about astronomical rents and home prices. And soon, tent cities sprang up and the Start Up Nation found itself on a Sit Down Strike. Israel is doing very well economically as a country (Standard and Poors recently raised their credit rating), but the gap between ultra rich and middle class has become astronomical and the average Israeli can’t make it. Buying an apartment costs an average of 12 years of salary. Israelis also have seen jumps in the cost of food. Earlier this summer another Facebook protest went viral over the cost of cottage cheese. At the same time that Leef set up her tent, real estate tycoon Yitzchak Tshuva threw a 2 million dollar wedding for his son, taking over an entire national park for several days. That didn’t just require money. That required what Israelis call Protectzia. Friends in high places. Govt corruption. People said enough is enough.

So while Tshuva had his wedding shindig, Tefilla and Tzedakkah took to the streets.

And Daphni Leef’s little posting turned into the largest mass movement for social change in Israel’s history, drawing 400,000 to its nationwide rallies. The grass roots protests have pressured governmental leaders to be more attuned to the needs of the ordinary middle class Israelis, who want kindergartens for their children, fair wages for teachers, affordable housing, and dignity for the elderly. And the government has begun to respond in kind. As the Forward commented in an editorial, “For now, perhaps for the first time in a long time, American Jews can…find inspiration from the passion pulsating down Israel's streets.”

So now, a few words about Israel. The time has come for all of us to care about the future of Israel as passionately as those who took to the streets. We need the same kind of people power here that they have shown there. There are many, including myself, who question some decisions made by Israel’s leaders. There are many, including myself, who have seen the human face of the Israeli - Palestinian conflict and recognize that there has been tremendous pain on both sides.

But there are others, too many, who just given up. They’ve lost interest. Too many have given up. Too many have become cynical. We can’t. It will not weaken Israel if we criticize it, internally and lovingly, as a family conversation. Israel will only be weakened if we ignore her. If we give up on her.

To address this problem, Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni has called for a dramatic reframing of the role of Israel in its relationship with world Jewry, built around four key principles.

First, if Israel is to realize its mission as the national home of the Jewish people, it must embrace an inclusive and pluralistic Jewish agenda that respects our traditions without denying the legitimacy of difference.

Second, the relationship between Israel and world Jewry should be seen as mutually reinforcing rather than hierarchical. We are equal partners with a shared destiny.

Third, there must be a place for responsible criticism of Israel’s policies without it being considered an act of betrayal. At the same time, those who criticize from within the family – those who criticize out of love –must also show sensitivity to the excruciating dilemmas and constraints under which Israel operates, and not fall victim to the double standards that so often characterize its critics.

Fourth, and most important, while in many ways Israel has realized the Zionist vision of establishing a Jewish state, we have yet to succeed in creating a society that is inspired by Jewish values, tradition, and experience – one that can be a source of moral leadership for Jews around the world This is not just a project for Israelis; it is a project for all Jews worldwide.

Israel needs us, our minds and our hearts. It needs advocacy, but even more, it needs full engagement. We need to understand the challenges Israel faces and be prepared to help our neighbors understand those challenges. And then we need to engage Israelis and their leaders so that Israel will become the best Israel it can be.

To do that, we need to have an unclouded view of how things are – we cannot underplay the disturbing things happening in Egypt right now, along with the dangers in Turkey, Gaza and Lebanon and most of all Iran. We need to be vigilant about that.

But at the same time, we need to distinguish between legitimate security threats and the politics of fear. David Hartman states correctly that it is disingenuous for us to brand Israel as being in a state of perpetual crisis. For one thing, it’s not true. Secondly, Israelis don’t buy it – stroll down the beach in Tel Aviv or in on of Jerusalem’s outdoor shopping malls you’re not looking at people who feel that they are living in perpetual crisis, though the situation is more challenging in outlying places like Sderot. Just yesterday a poll in an Israeli newspaper indicated that a full 88 percent of Israelis say their country is a good place to live.

Third, it’s counterproductive. Fear just becomes another excuse to disengage. If Israel is depicted as a scary and vulnerable, who would want to go there? Who could be proud of it? Go to the website of Jerusalem’s Bloomfield Science Museum and see an exhibit of Israel’s 50 greatest inventions and you’ll be amazed. Where would we be without the key flash drive, the Intel processor, the electric car, the pill cam, a tiny camera that you ingest to get an inside view of your small intestine ad last but not least, the cherry tomato. And finally, fear breeds paralysis and moral regression.

I learned that in Johannesburg, where everyone lives behind an electrified fence. The people are friendly, but it is a scary place to be.

Israel faces challenges –real, existential threats – but also opportunities. The place is flourishing, and the newly discovered natural gas reserves will only make things better. It is a high tech superpower and in position to lead the next stages of the social networking revolution. Israel is therefore not isolated. But she needs to build more bridges, especially to the newly empowered people of her changing and volatile neighborhood. And in order to that, she needs peace. And peace means two states. In short, Israel and the Palestinians both need Mandela-type thinking in order to emerge on the right side of history – and we need to help them get there.

For when they do, it will be a beautiful sight. We will at last break the cycle of victimization and revenge that began with Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael.

So I propose that during this year of engagement at Temple Beth El, we redouble our engagement with Israel. I am proud that over the past year our congregation has welcomed speakers spanning the full spectrum of opinion, at a time when most Jewish organizations have been afraid to do so. Is there another synagogue where Ari Fleischer, Alan Dershowitz and Jeremy Ben Ami could appear in the same year? So come to our events. Better yet, join me at AIPAC’s policy conference next March, or, best of all, come with Mara and me to Jerusalem next July. The time to go is now. The experience is unforgettable and as safe as it ever has been. Take a copy of our itinerary from the information table in the lobby, or check it out online (click here) .

“For on that day, a great shofar will be sounded,” says Isaiah in a verse from the Shofarot section of today’s service. And then he adds, prophetically, “Those lost in the land of Assyria and those cast away in the land of Egypt shall come back and worship Adonai on the holy mountain in Jerusalem.” On that great day, this verse proclaims, Egyptians, Israelis and Syrians will worship together in Jerusalem. Well, although that may not be happening yet, Syrians, Egyptians and Israelis are already posting on one another’s walls on Facebook. We’re “virtually” there!

Nelson Mandela wrote, “Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death."

We needn’t despair. Bin Laden is gone. Kaddafi is out. Assad will be gone soon too. Apartheid is no more. It is buried in the same graveyard as Jim Crow and the SS and the KGB.

If we can strengthen Israel as a bastion of democracy and stability in the Middle East, she will be a light unto her neighbors. And then, if we can fully engage with Israel, to instill her with the Jewish values of kindness and compassion that have sustained our people for thousands of years, then she will be a light unto the world.

Teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakkah will finally defeat religious extremism, ignorance and fear.

Let this be, then, a year of engagement for us all.

Amen

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Rosh Hashanah Day 2, 5772
The We of Me, by Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

FOR AUDIO CLICK HERE (or above)

My sermons during these High Holidays are focusing on that basic truth as expressed by God in Genesis 2, “Lo tov heyot ha-adam levado” - “It is not good for man to be alone,” as we strive here at Beth El to become a community of engagement. Today, I want to discuss what that means and why it’s important to be part of such a community – and I’ll also talk about lions.

Gee, you’re thinking. He’s speaking about the importance of belonging to a synagogue on the very day when we’ve opened our High Holidays services to those who are unaffiliated. How convenient!

Welcome, unaffiliated friends! Hey, and I get it. Joining is not for everyone. But give me a few minutes and I’ll explain why it should be. I’ll show you why you gotta BELONG. But first and foremost – let’s start engaging – so please turn to the people around you and wish them a Shana Tova.

You really can’t be Jewish in isolation. To have a complete service, you need to be part of a minyan, a quorum of ten. It all begins with that. The rabbis said that God is present wherever there is a minyan. It’s not that God can’t be experienced on your own, but the communal setting is the ideal setting. That’s why we don’t have Jewish monasteries, out in the middle of nowhere. Could you imagine a Jewish vow of silence? That one would go over well!

It’s not enough to simply drop in, and the rabbis understood that. Next week on Yom Kippur we’ll re-imagine that dramatic moment when the High Priest went into the Holy of Holies to pray for his people. According to the Talmud, what did he pray? What do you think? We know he probably didn’t pray for the Red Sox. He said, "God, may you not heed the prayer of the wayfarers.”

Sounds strange, almost vindictive. AND BY THE WAY, I AM NOT ENDORSING IT! I CAN JUST SEE THE HEADLINE NOW. “RABBI WELCOMES UNAFFILIATED GUESTS BY PRAYING THAT GOD WON’T HEAR THEIR PRAYERS.”

So why does the Talmud say this? Well, what do tourists pray for? Nice bargains. A good restaurant. And most of all – good weather.

There’s the rub. When the high priest went into the Holy of Holies – he was praying for a year of sustenance for his people. In other words, he was praying for RAIN. In Israel at this time of year the ground is parched. It’s still hot. They need rain desperately. And it’s important to note that the priests was fearful that the tourist’s prayer would be effective. So any tourists out there, know that the Talmud considers your prayers to be as valid as anyone else’s. It’s just that the priest then said, “God, don’t listen to them. WE NEED RAIN.”

So what’s the message here? A tourist who is just passing through has no real stake in the serious issues that face a community. When people travel, anywhere, we often express the wish that there be no incidents, while we are there. That’s pretty selfish, when you think about it. We should care for those who live there all the time. We should recognize that our destinies are thoroughly intertwined.

A tourist won’t pray for that infant who were delivered prematurely to the woman in row five. And a tourist won’t sit up all night with a fellow congregant awaiting heart surgery, sitting over there. A tourist won’t know that the person sitting next to him is weeping because his daughter survived a horrible auto accident, or that the person on the other side was just laid off.

It’s one thing not to know. None of us knows all the intimate details of every congregant’s life. The difference is this: The tourist doesn’t care. The tourist walks in and walks out without leaving so much as a footprint in the sand.

The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai described it in his poem, “Tourists.”

“Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!"

I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, "You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

This is the place for authentic, sacred relationships that can sustain us at key moments of our lives. But only if you engage.

We ask that you engage. And in return we grant you the greatest gift we can bestow – the gift of sharing one’s few precious years on this earth with a loving, like-minded community of seekers and strivers, all trying to figure it out, all trying to make a difference, all together.

When you engage, it’s real. The drama is so real. The parade of extraordinary young adults who come up to this bima every Shabbat to become b’nai mitzvah – it’s real. Their stories are compelling. It’s real! Come here and you won’t miss “All My Children” because they are all our children.

People join synagogues for lots of reasons. But primarily it’s about social ties. You may have heard that old line about the guy who comes to services every Shabbat and someone asks him why, and he says, “I don’t believe in God. Finkelstein over there, he comes to talk to God. I come to talk to Finkelstein.”

For Jews it’s less a matter of believing in God than EXPERIENCING God. So the guy who comes to talk to Finkelstein – he’s talking to God and not knowing it. That IS God – the coming together, forming bonds of trust in a sacred communal quest. And making a minyan for someone else to say Kaddish and feel a little less lonely. The joining of hands – that is God.

It’s like the classic Hasidic story of two people who meet in the middle of a dark forest, and each one is lost. But they say to each other, “Maybe together, we can find the right way.”

We’re all lost. We’re all groping for answers. But together, we can search. And together, we will never be lonely. As Ecclesiastes states, “Two are better than one; if one falls, the other will lift him up."

Lo Tov Heyot ha-Adam Levado – For it is not good for man to be alone.

David Brooks wrote a book this year called “The Social Animal.” He says that “We're social animals, not rational animals.” Our relationships determine who we are. He shows research that a baby who has formed close bonds at 18 months is 77% more likely to graduate high school than one who hasn’t.

It all begins with relationship – and it begins with the simple math – of two becoming one. We crave that Oneness. Down deep, we know that’s what matters. When we come together in community, it is a fusion of souls.

South Africans are guided by the Zulu saying, "Umuntu, ngumuntu, negamantu,” meaning, “I exist only through others – I am because we are.” The word “ubuntu” means “the We of Me.” The Talmud states precisely the same thing. “Kol Yisrael Arevim ze ba-zeh,” “All Israel is responsible for one other.”

Classical Hebrew has no expression for independence. But there are a host of terms for inter-dependence. In a congregation, it is all about the WE of ME.

Another reason to be part of a congregation: It helps us to navigate our pathway through life’s luminous events, the sacred moments of the lifecycle. I know how privileged I am to have accompanied so many families through so many transitions. Just this month I was speaking with a bat mitzvah girl about her parents’ wedding, which took place right here, and then I showed her a photo of her grandmother – and the photo was taken at my son’s bris. How could this young girl not feel firmly rooted, with so many lives intertwined in this one place?

Lifecycle is very much on my mind right now, because we’ve just entered a new phase: the empty nest. Last month we sent Dan off to college.

Over the years I’ve shared so many special moments with you, reflecting about my kids as they grew. I’ve shared so much about them that I practically invented the concept of “too much information.” But now, I’m an empty nester. I have nothing more to write about!

And, as an empty nester, I am a high risk member of this synagogue. As the kids move away, we are often tempted to drop affiliations the way we might clean out the kid’s cluttered bedroom – to downsize, to shed some ballast. To loosen those ties.

But empty nesters need community more than ever. For we’ve now entered the age of wisdom. We have stories and important lessons to share. All we need to do is connect: we’re still social animals.

So middle aged adults are, surprise, surprise, the fastest growing group on Facebook. Much to the dismay of our kids! We’re not severing relationships…we’re intensifying them. And now with social media, everyone has become a rabbi; everyone’s telling those annoying stories about their lives that up until recently you only heard from me. I go online and I know who is at the movies right now. On some level, I care. I connect to each stage of the life cycle without having to officiate at it. Who’s learning how to ride a bike, whose pet just died, who is visiting their kid in college, who just took their first exam, who is having coffee at Starbucks with the cantor, who just got back from Israel and who just went to the beach, who is sick, who is recovering, mi yichyeh, mi yamut, who by fire and who by water, who is truly alive and who is depressed, who is content and who is lonely. It’s all out there. For empty nesters, and for everyone else. This is the stuff of community, the Face-book of Life. Judaism was always about engagement – but now everything is about those webs that we weave together.

We do all this online, but we still need a place to engage face to face. And when I say that we are a community of engagement, I really mean it. In August the cantor and I performed a wedding for a couple who got engaged after meeting right here, last year, on Yom Kippur! In the afternoon! First row in the social hall. I kid you not. I’m telling you, unaffiliateds, join here and who knows what will happen! (But if you’re married, hopefully not THAT!)

We engage at each key moment in life. We’re now providing meals not only for people who have just suffered a death, but also for families who have just experienced a birth, a time when new parents might just be a little too tired to cook. Our new Director of Community Engagement has recruited a group of young parents who have volunteered to prepare those meals. We’ve developed a vibrant young professionals group where singles and couples can meet. Most weekday mornings now, our building is bursting with a hundred learning retirees upstairs and our Shorashim class of two year olds downstairs. And it all comes together, right here.

Belonging to a congregation like ours gives us the chance to bring joy, love and laughter to the weekly pace of our lives, to live by a Jewish rhythm punctuated by Shabbat. And every Shabbat has become a moment to celebrate here, to sing, laugh and cry together, particularly on Friday nights.

Also, belonging to a religious community helps us become one not only with those alive, but with those who came before us. They are part of our minyan too. They are with us right now. When I was in South Africa last summer, I was impressed at the enduring power of ritual and tradition among the people. In Soweto, I noticed that there are an extraordinary number of funeral homes. I learned that funerals are a major part of the local culture, because their dead ancestors are very much alive to them, a vivid presence in their lives, so vivid that our Safari guide’s name was actually “Remember.” It’s similar for us. Keeping alive the dreams of our ancestors is a powerful reason to be part of a religious community. And it’s not just their dreams that remain with us.

In his book, David Brooks writes of a a scientist named Douglas Hofstadter at the University of Indiana, who was married to a woman named Carol, and they had a wonderful relationship. Then Carol had a brain tumor and died suddenly when the kids were very young. In a book he subsequently wrote, Hofstadter describes a moment when he came across Carol’s picture on the mantel.

"I looked at her face, and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes. And all at once I found myself saying as tears flowed, 'That's me. That's me.' And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes, but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us into a unit -- the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized that, though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all…."

When we sit here in prayer, say Kaddish at a yahrzeit or simply reflect, we sense that same fusion of souls. We join a congregation because it makes us one with all who came before. The simple math – we are where two become one. The We of Me.

So I’ve given you a number of reasons to be part of a synagogue community - and notice that I haven’t once brought up High Holiday tickets. The High Holidays are the dessert. You need to come for the meal.

This summer in Africa I learned many things that can help us in our quest to be a community of engagement. I’d like to share some reflections with you.

We are social animals. And like all animals, we crave a natural order of things, a simple sense of who were are and, as Tevya liked to say, what God expects us to do. That simple sense of understanding our place in the grand scheme. That’s what I look for in my community – and that’s what I found in Africa.

Safari means “long journey” in Swahili, and indeed I felt very far from home. But strangely, while there I felt equally AT home. Not like a tourist at all, but a small part of vast, orderly ecosystem. I became part of that world – as it became a part of me. A world without cages or walls. I would look off my porch and an elephant would be munching away at branches down below. No boundaries. For me it lent a whole new meaning to the expression, “the elephant in the room.”

In our world, the only sure things are death and taxes. But there, the only sure thing is death. And death is ever present. But because of that, death is strangely beautiful there. And because of that, every moment of life is enhanced and sharpened. The reds of the sunset are redder. The blue waters are bluer. The lion’s roar is louder. And the stars are unbelievably bright.

The animals we saw were free and content - except for those unfortunate moments when they were being eaten. When you’ve seen these animals, you can never go back to a zoo. Have you ever seen, in the zoo, a baby elephant running through the brush from one parent to another, back and forth, (I’m with mommy – I’m with daddy) skipping and smiling like a school kid? Once you’ve been out there, life develops its own natural rhythm, and it is very hard to leave it. The outside world just seems a dreamlike memory, something not real. This was real. This little savannah in the northeast corner of South Africa was like our Anatevka. Every creature knew her place, all of them living in complete, uncomplicated relationship with one another.

No wonder the book of Job states, “God teaches us from the animals of the land, and from the birds of the heavens makes us wise.” To be out there takes your breath away.

But you need patience. On our first day on safari, for about an hour all we saw were groups of impala and some sand squirrels.

Deer and squirrels, I thought. And for this I came 8,000 miles!

And then we saw the lions.

Karen Blixen wrote, “You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.” And by the end of this trip, I knew what she meant. There is such pathos to their story. So powerful. Yet so fragile. With lions, the problem of infant mortality is particularly acute. Three out of four cubs do not make it to adulthood. So the lion population has become dangerously small. It was shocking to learn that lion males eat the cubs of other sires so that their gene pool may dominate. They willingly will destroy all the other kids in order to promote the fortunes of their own.

Back here we call that the college admissions process.

In Zimbabwe, Mara and I spent an afternoon with a group that protects cubs during infancy, and then, when they are grown, slowly weans them back into the wild. You may have seen those photos of us walking with the lions. Those were real lions, not stuffed animals. We never felt like we were in any danger. They were wild, but used to humans, and we were part of their gradual reintroduction to their natural environment.

No wonder lions have become a prime symbol of the Jewish people and Jerusalem. Noble yet so vulnerable. Fiercely loyal and fiercely protective. In Jewish art, lions are always guarding something; they are the epitome of earthly courage. No wonder Leon Uris chose the name Ari – lion – for his quintessential Israeli hero in “Exodus” and Israel often uses lion synonyms like Kfir and Lavie in naming their jet fighters. The lion and the Jew share nobility - and loneliness.

Adult males wander vast distances and always appear forlorn or threatened. One night we heard a lion’s wail, all night long, that sounded almost like the piercing sound of the shofar, only weighed down by perpetual sadness. We met a real-life version of Scar, from the Lion King – a male known as a ruthless killer, with much of his ragged main torn and his face gaunt, with visible scars on his face.

One morning our guide heard about a kill that had occurred a few miles away, and we rushed across the bush to locate it. We came upon two lions, who were panting, exhausted from having spent the night devouring a giraffe. As our jeep slowed down for a peak at the predators and their prey, I felt like a rubbernecker on the Merritt. But we had to see this. Even this long-time vegetarian was transfixed at this most carnivorous sight. It somehow reaffirmed my faith in the order of things. This was a meaningful death, meant to perpetuate the grand plan. That giraffe had been born, in part, for the purpose of being eaten by that lion, and on some level the giraffe knew it. In the words of the poet Marcia Falk, “To celebrate life is…ultimately to embrace death….all death leads to life again. From peelings to mulch to new potatoes, the world is ever renewing, ever renewed.”

That evening, we heard the news about the horrible mass murder that took place at a summer camp in Norway. The contrast could not be more stark. On the one hand, senseless murder in a world gone mad. But here on the savannah, death reaffirming a grander plan and sustaining nature’s precious balance. I caught myself wishing that we wouldn’t have to go back to so-called civilization. I somehow felt safer on the savannah, even with elephants in the room.

Incidentally, did you know that giraffes are kosher? I don’t think that lion cared, but they are. But you won’t find much giraffe meat at Fairway. There are, shall we say, logistical problems. Imagine this little old rabbi with a knife walking up to a giraffe, pulling out a step ladder and trying to find the right spot to kill it painlessly.

I fell in love with giraffes – they are clearly the most Jewish animal that we saw. They’re basically pacifist, but they have a good swift kick to fend off predators. Like Jews, they hang out in family groups and protect each other. They are a little goofy and awkward and try to keep out of everyone else’s way. And they are ruminants. That, along with the split hoof, is what makes them kosher.

It’s great to be a ruminant. Giraffes are able to enjoy life. They nosh a little, and then they just hang while they regurgitate their food and eat it again with their second stomach. Elephants, in contrast, have only one stomach, so they have to keep eating. And they are gluttonous, eating the equivalent of the weight of three people in leaves and branches in a single day. All they do is eat. They never get to reflect. An elephants may never forget, but memory alone is not enough. You need to make sense of those memories. Giraffes and other ruminants get to, well, ruminate. Like Jews. That’s why they’re kosher. You are what you eat – and Jews eat animals that are peace-loving ruminators.

One time our guide alerted us to a pair of giraffes that looked like they were about to, well, you know. (I keep hearing a voice saying, "Pumbaa, not in front of the kids" - but this is G-rated) The male’s chin was in an unusual upright position and the female was indicating assent. We watched for a couple of minutes. The male kept on chewing and chewing. Ruminating. Finally the female walked away. The moment was missed. God knows what this male was thinking. Was he worried what his mother would say? If giraffes are the most Jewish of animals, we had just met the Woody Allen of giraffes.

Rhinos are fascinating. Whenever I saw one I felt like we were in Jurassic Park. I asked our guide who is the rhino’s most feared predator and he said, “You.” Sure enough, rhino poaching has reached epidemic proportions in southern Africa. I also learned that rhino males pile their dung in huge heaps, to leave as sort of calling card to their territory, so their families can find them. Our guide compared it to posting on someone's Facebook wall. The rhino dung is actually cleaner than some of what I’ve seen posted on Facebook walls.

In the bush you lose the outside world. They had Internet in the camp library, but service was sporadic and we stayed off for several days. One guy from the Upper East Side was with us on a game drive. He brought his blackberry. “It’s for emergencies,” he said. So there we were, gaping at a hyena nursing her cubs, and he was checking his email.

The animals routinely made eye contact with us. Their eyes invited us into their world. They often interacted with us. I was lying on a lounge chair at one camp and a baboon came over and grabbed my glass of diet coke. We came across a group of zebras and rather than running away, they seemed to pose for our photos. But a stallion then gracefully stepped in front of his pregnant mate so that we would come no closer – to her. Chivalry lives.

It was fascinating to see how the different species interact. Many of the more vulnerable ones would hang out near each other to have strength in numbers, to ward off lions and leopards. Exactly a half hour after sunset, we saw hundreds of guinea fowl fly up into the same tree, right next to a pond – we had never see them even spread their wings before. There they would sleep safely, handing from the branches together.

We saw battles, like a high noon standoff between a heron and an eagle, and two bull rhinos locked in a struggle that left both of them bloodied. I wondered whether there was any rhyme or reason to all of this beyond a Darwinian survival of the fittest. I knew it had to be something grander than the reasons humans fight. I knew that there had to be something more to it than that rhino A refused to pick up the check.

Despite these spasms of violence, most of what we saw was like a grand Garden of Eden. Lots of moms and babies cuddling. Lots of kids growing up and leaving the nest. I could relate to that one. But the parents there seemed to be having a much easier time than I am. Lots of eating, drinking and sleeping. The miracle of the ordinary. On Shabbat afternoon we were lying on our porch overlooking the water hole. I looked down and saw a small antelope called a steenbok, gently picking at branches and drinking. I thought of Psalm 42, which the cantor often sings on Friday night. “As a deer thirsts for water, so, O Lord, do I thirst for You” – The world around me seemed so at peace and complete, tapped in to the great source of all connection, and Oneness. It was much bigger than me. But in part because of that, it was of great comfort to me.

Because I realized that long after I am gone, this will still be here, and to the degree that I am tapped into it, so will I.

I look around this room right now and I feel the same way.

It was hard to leave this blissful place. As our jeep drove out, heading on the bumpy road toward the airport, a rhino stood by the road staring at us as if saluting us and saying goodbye. They had so invited us into their world that we became a part of it. I had become the accidental non-tourist. I had tapped into the We of Me.

I thought of what Karen Blixen wrote:

“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”

We rambled through the neighboring villages and I knew that there is really no permanent place for me there – no “Rabbis' Peace Corps” program that I could join, where I could teach the locals how to burn their hametz and lay tefillin. No, my natural place is back here. But strangely, having fit in so easily into that little jungle of Anatevka, where every creature knows his place and what God expects him to do, it became easier to transfer those feelings back to what I do here.

Blixen also wrote, “We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.”

My week on the savannah reminded me that I have a place, a role to play, that I am a small piece in a very large puzzle, but that I fit in, right here, right next to the deer and the squirrels, the cantor and the choir, the newborn and the grieving widow, and you. We all have our sacred task in this eternal game. We all know a song of Africa, the place where the first homo sapiens walked, and where our ancestors emerged from the cauldron of Egyptian slavery - and Africa knows a song of each of us.

And we know a song of Jewish destiny – and that destiny has a place for us, right here.

And that is why we belong to a congregation. We are social animals. We are animals, and like all of God’s creatures, we exist solely through relationship, with one another, with other species, and with our Source, our Creator – with all of life. Like the lion, we come here to protect and defend, like the rhino, we seek out our loved ones, and like the giraffe, we ruminate. But as long as we are here, we never lose our bearings and even when we are gone, we will remain here. For when we die, and the “me” disappears, the “we” will remain.

So stay with us. Find the “we” in “me.” Shed your thick tourist skin. Become one with your synagogue community. Lo Tov Heyot Adam Levado - It is not good for man to be alone.

It’s a jungle out there.

Amen

Click below for photos from the Africa trip

Africa Photos

TBE Israel Adventure, 2012

Join us on our next fantastic TBE Israel Adventure in the summer of 2012. To see the revised full itinerary, click here. Revised pricing and other information can be found here. and the registration form can be downloaded here.

Reservations are being taken now!

Fasting Before A Marathon - Hammerman on Ethics (Jewish Week)

Fasting Before A Marathon

Q - My brother and I are running the Chicago Marathon which is the day after Yom Kippur. We want to fast, however we have been told that it is unwise to do so the day before running 26 miles. Since this is an ethical dilemma, we need your advice.

A – Well, at the very least, by observing Yom Kippur you could label yourself a “fast runner.” Sorry.

This conflict has been a source of great consternation for Jewish runners in Chicago, but there is no consensus among doctors as to how dangerous it is to run after having fasted the day before.

So as a rabbi, what I can tell you is that fasting is required except in a situation where it is a matter of life and death. Basically, that means if a person is ill (or about to deliver a child) and fasting would make you sicker, that is an "out." The problem here is that it you're not really ill – only at risk of becoming ill. I would never want to advise you to do something that could potentially harm you.

The idea of fasting on Yom Kippur is really not as much about what goes into your mouth on a particular day as that you focus on what comes out of it the rest of the year. The most important thing is that YK be a meaningful day for you. So even if you decide to curtail your fast, you can still make the most out of the day.

I can’t recommend curtailing it, but I’ve heard of how Gabe Carimi, the stellar offensive lineman from the University of Wisconsin, when facing the dilemma of playing on Yom Kippur, actually adjusted his twenty four hour fast so that it would conclude just before game time. One might say that he fasted as if he were in Israel, where it’s already dark when it’s 1 PM in Madison. Unorthodox to say the least, but commendable. Now that he’s in the NFL, Carimi’s checked the Jewish calendar for the next decade and was relieved to know that a similar conflict is unlikely to occur. Just the fact that he is so concerned puts him in the Sandy Koufax stratosphere. Over the coming days, as Yom Kippur approaches and the baseball playoffs heat up, it is highly likely that Jewish baseball players Kevin Youkilis, Ryan Braun and Ian Kinsler will face the same dilemma.

A piece of good news this year is that because the holidays fall so late, it gets dark earlier, so Yom Kippur will end early enough on Sat. evening for you to hydrate to your heart's content. I’ve heard that the time of the traditional pasta dinner will be extended by Chicago marathon officials that Saturday night.

So what it comes down to is this. As a rabbi, I can’t give you an easy out from fasting. But I also would never want you to put yourself in any danger and certainly would not advise you to do that.

Meanwhile, let the people running the Chicago Marathon know that they picked a bad day!

The Death Penalty Circus

Q – Was it right for the state of Georgia to execute Troy Anthony Davis?

A – The Davis case has once again put capital punishment on trial. No DNA evidence implicated him, no gun, no fingerprints and a bevy of recanting witnesses. I’d say that there is more than a remote possibility that an innocent man was killed. That being the case, it was, from the Jewish ethical perspective, the equivalent of state sponsored murder.

I only wish that the execution had been televised on all the networks to a national audience. Put it on at halftime of an NFL (National Finish-off-your-opponent-by-beating-his-brains-out League) game. Then perhaps Americans would wake up to their own bloodlust. Or perhaps they wouldn't. In the past decade, four states – New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Illinois – have abandoned the death penalty, leaving 34 states still with capital punishment. Maybe this case will help to tip the scales in my own state of Connecticut, where recent legislative votes have been very close.

The Torah mandates the death penalty for 36 offenses, ranging from murder to kidnapping, adultery to incest, certain forms of rape, idolatrous worship and public incitement to apostasy, from disrespecting parents to desecrating the Sabbath. But the rabbinic sages effectively abolished the death penalty centuries later. Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 stresses the importance of presenting completely accurate testimony in capital cases, for any mistakes or falsehoods could result in the shedding of innocent blood. If any perjury were to cause an execution, "the blood of the accused and his unborn offspring stain the perjurer forever."

In Talmudic times, capital cases required a 23-judge court, while only three judges sat for non-capital cases. Two or more eyewitnesses were required to testify to the defendant's guilt, and their hands would, "be the first against him to put him to death" (Deuteronomy 17:6-7). In a capital case, a one-vote majority could acquit a defendant, but could not convict. Furthermore, if there was a mere one-vote majority or if any judge was undecided, additional judges were added in pairs until the majority ruled against conviction, or until one judge in favor of conviction was persuaded to err on the side of innocence (Mishnah Sanhedrin 5:5).

In practice, the death penalty became almost impossible to implement, though over the centuries there has been a diversity of opinion on the matter. Maimonides claims that murderers should not be executed if there was a question about how the trial was conducted. But if the trial was conducted properly there is no restriction even if it means that one thousand murderers are executed in a single day. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein counters that the purpose of assigning the death penalty to so many crimes in the Torah is to educate people about the severity of the offenses, rather than to end the lives of the offenders. That practice has continued to this day in modern Israel, where not even terrorists with blood on their hands are executed. Only those convicted of crimes against humanity (i.e. Adolf Eichmann) have been executed.

In the U.S., the statistics are daunting:

Nationally, since 1973, 138 prisoners sentenced to death later have been exonerated.

The average time spent on death row by an exoneree is 9.8 years.

DNA has played a role in exonerating 17 death row prisoners. But in many death penalty cases, DNA testing proves impossible because of a lack of testable evidence.

Scientific evidence strongly suggests that Texas executed an innocent man, Cameron Willingham, in 2004. Compelling evidence in other cases suggests more innocent people have been executed.

Causes of wrongful conviction include: eyewitness misidentification, police coercion, perjury, prosecutorial misconduct, and inadequate representation.

Nationally, 50% of murder victims are white. In cases resulting in an execution, however, the murder victim is white 76% of the time. Studies in Connecticut, North Carolina, Maryland, and California found that one’s odds of receiving the death penalty increase significantly when the victim is white.

Because of additional resources and preparation required in death penalty cases, a separate sentencing phase, post-conviction appeals, and the added costs of death row facilities, studies consistently find the death penalty to be more costly than life without parole.

Since death sentences peaked in 1996, at 315, nationwide the number of death sentences has been declining. The number of death sentences in 2010, 114, was near the historic lows.

It’s time to put an end to this murderous circus.

TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Max Kitay on Ki Tavo

Shabbat Shalom!

Those of you who know me know how I love to skateboard. I was around 9 years old when I first tried it out, and I must say I’ve gotten pretty good. So, why do I like it? Well, for one thing, it’s lots of fun. I like the speed, the wind in my face, mastering tricks like an Ollie (which is sort of like a jump on the board), or a Kick flip, which is an Ollie, but once you’re in the air, you flip your board and then land on it. I can’t land it yet but I’m trying.

Which brings me to my point: Skateboarding has lots of similarities to Judaism, to my Torah portion and to this time of year before the High Holidays.
You might be interested to learn that Skateboarding is so popular in Israel that there is a new Hebrew word for it, just introduced a couple of years ago. A skateboard is called a galgeshet. It’s similar to the word for a surf board, because it’s like riding on a wave of air.

Skateboarding has taught me a lot about how important it is to never give up. At Scalzi Park, there is what we call a skateboarding bowl, which is a huge bowl with walls curving up the sides. It took me a long time to build up the courage to skate down into the bowl and up the other side. It took a couple of months, lots of trying and trying, starting from the bottom and working my way up. But now I can do it!
In the same way, at this time of year, Jews recognize that improvement does not come easy. As we set our goals for the New Year we also can’t give up, even if we fall short sometimes and seem far from the target. Right now, it’s hard to imagine that climb to Yom Kippur, but if we keep our eyes on that target, we’ll achieve our goals.
Another similarity between skating and the High Holidays is that, while we need speed to make it to the other side, there is also a need for caution and balance. In skateboarding, I like having the wind in my face and you can’t do tricks without generating speed and momentum. But you have to be cautious too. It’s important not to lose your balance.

We all are rushing so much in our lives, but in less than two weeks we’ll be slowing down for Rosh Hashanah, to catch our breath and see how far we’ve come. My portion teaches that our actions have consequences, for good or not. On a skateboard, every slight move or lean can change direction. In life, the same thing is true. Even the smallest mistake can lead to disaster. And even the smallest act of kindness can change a life.

I’ve learned that from my mitzvah projects, the Jumpstart Walk and Friendship Circle. They are great programs that you can read about them in my booklet.
Little did I know that when I’m on my skateboard I’m doing a very Jewish thing. As we prepare for the High Holidays, and I begin this new phase in my life, I hope that together we can all Ollie into the New Year. This has been, after all, a LEAP year. And as we take that leap into the next one, we can truly call these the High OLLIE-days!

TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Simone Teich on Ki Tetze

My Torah portion contains over 70 mitzvot, more laws than any other portion in the Torah. Almost all of them have to do with relationships – between friends, parents and children, workers and employers and people and animals. Some of the examples given in this portion, though, may not be the most effective ways of teaching these laws to people living in our times. I’d like a show of hands: how many people here plow their fields with both an ox AND a donkey?

Just what I thought! So my job here is to help explain some of these laws using examples from my own life. Fortunately, there are lots. I have a very interesting life! But actually, examples of many of these laws can be found in ALL our lives, not just mine.

So here we go: Here’s my commentary on this portion of Ki Tetze.

1. The portion explains what happens when a child becomes rebellious. No, that child is not me. The treatment is very harsh – too harsh to say in most opinions, including those of the rabbis who later commented on it. But really, this mitzvah is talking about how important it is to use discipline and good judgment in raising a child. It so happens that I have just signed on to my first babysitting job. I am very excited to have a chance to babysit these 5 year old twin girls. Once I have experience babysitting, I’ll have my first glimpse at how complicated it is to be a parent. I’ll have lots more sympathy for my parents!

2. The portion instructs us to return lost objects to our neighbors and too show concern even to those we don’t know. So a year or two ago, I was playing mini golf with my mom, sister and brother, and as we were leaving and walking to our car, I saw something in the bushes. When I went over to it, I discovered that it was a wallet. I brought it to my mom to check for i.d. There was no identification but there a few hundred dollars in it. We brought it to the manager and he said, “You can give me the number and if anyone who has lost a wallet calls us, we’ll give them your number to claim it.” We waited for 6 months and no one called. We have used a large portion of that money to buy toys for David’s Closet and the Bennent Cancer Center at Stamford Hospital. Children undergoing treatment get to go and pick out a toy or gift from this closet. I hope that the item they choose makes them feel better. I had fun going to the store and selecting great toys for this kids to have and play with. Those toys we have purchased are in the baskets up on the bima.

3. Another law instructs us to lift animals when they’ve fallen. We once found a dog on the side of the road. He was just sitting there all alone. My mom told us to stay in the car while she went out to see if it had a collar; it did not. After she checked it just walked away and sat on a nearby lawn. We didn’t want to leave but it seemed like that might be the dog’s lawn, so we left. And just last week, my friend’s dog got through the invisible fence. We went running after it and we finally caught him. Even if its not always your animal it is always good to lend a helping hand to other animals and people in need.

4. Another law states that you should build a protective fence on the roof of your house. In those days, people had flat roofs and did a lot up there. In a similar way, my Dad has strict policies that whoever rides a bike anywhere needs to wear a helmet. The idea behind this mitzvah is that we are responsible for the safety of those who come under our care – and especially into and around our homes.

5. Here’s a strange law – we’re not supposed to wear things that mix wool and flax together. In fact, even in those days, the priests did wear wool and flax, but I think the idea here is that every generation needs to make its own fashion statement. And sometimes, its best not to mix things, but sometimes it is. As many of you know, I love fashion design, especially shoes, and I’ve come up with some nice, interesting blends of shoe types. Think Uggs with high heels. Comfortable… Ehh. But it’s a real possibility(sarcastic)! Well, maybe not.

As you can see, the prime message of this portion is that we should care for others. I’ve not only managed to do this with these examples but also through my special mitzvah projects, including donating my hair twice to Locks of Love and the Rocks for Brian project that you can read about in my bat mitzvah booklet.

As I become a bat mitzvah, I hope to discover more ways to apply the wisdom of my portion to my life.

Dip Your Apple

You gotta love it!

TBE Bar/Bat Mitzvah Commentary: Sarah Druckman on Shoftim

Believe it or not my Torah portion today is not Noah and the great flood, even though that may be the most appropriate, given this past week’s events. I am so relieved that we are all here together celebrating my Bat Mitzvah, with electricity -- and with the Rabbi.

Today my Torah portion is Shoftim, which means “judges”. Shoftim is a fascinating and very complex torah portion about all kinds of things from soothsayers and black magic, to chopping down trees during war, to unusual rituals around unidentified murder victims. So when I first read it my initial thought was, “what the heck?” and then “I don’t get it” and then, “what does this have to do with me or my bat mitzvah?” But with a little help from the rabbi, some guidance from www.writemybatmitzvahspeech.com and some parental advice, I realized that this portion is about judging, and this, I know something about.
 
My portion gives judges three pieces of important advice. They are:
• Don’t favor the rich or poor
• Don’t take a bribe, and
• Pursue justice, justly
I would like to think that I practice all three. As for not favoring the rich or poor, my Mizvah project focused on helping feed hungry kids in America. This has shown me first hand not to consider myself any better than anyone else simply because I have enough food to put on my table. Especially in today’s unstable economy, I have learned that people from all walks of life can find themselves without enough money for food.
As for not taking bribes – well I’m only 12, what do I really know about that? But I can say with confidence that I never would try to bribe or influence the judges unfairly at my dance competitions.

The most important advice is the last one which in Hebrew is Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof which I recited in the first torah portion today. The scholars wonder why the word Tzedek, justice, is repeated twice. One response is that it is not enough to pursue justice but you have to do it justly.

Over the past few years I have had many experiences of both being a judge and being judged. In my last two years of middle school I have learned not to quickly judge others. I have found that I need to use my own judgement about people and not be swayed by gossip or rumors. This is not always so easy as a teenager. It is easy to get caught up in wanting to fit in by going along with the popular opinion. I am proud that I can stand up for what I believe in and feel confident in my actions.

For the past 5 years I have been on a dance competition team where a group of judges evaluates our team performances and scores us against the other teams. This year I competed my first solo dance performance. This was the first time that I was alone on stage being judged independently (which was great practice for today). As Shoftim discusses, judges should be fair and impartial. There were times when I felt I was judged justly and other times, maybe not so much. But rather than let the judges scores discourage me, I use their feedback to strive to improve my skills and try harder the next time.


If there is one thing you take away from today’s torah portion, always remember to judge others justly. If someone wrongs you, confront it and deal with it fairly rather than seeking revenge or staying angry. Remember: tzedek tzedek tirdof!