The post Tikvah Talk October-November 2019 appeared first on Congregation B'nai Tikvah.

I used to have an invisible friend. I remember him being in my earliest memories. His name was Billy. I loved Billy. Billy was a boy and he could do all the things that boys do- the things that I couldn’t do myself. I used to dream when I was little that I was a boy. Literally, in my dreams I was always a boy. I think I was Billy. It was confusing, but then my brother was born and that settled it. I was a girl. All my clothes were pink frilly things and dresses. I was 5 and didn’t understand why I couldn’t wear my jeans to the first day of school like my brother. As my brother and I got older it was the toys that really got me. I would get barbies, but I didn’t want them. I wanted the dump trucks and the hot wheels. I wanted the guns and the big wheel. I didn’t get any of it, and my brother and I grew up fighting a bunch. Mostly cause I kept taking his toys to play with. (we’re better now and share more easily).

By 7th or 8th grade I began to notice my friends getting really excited about boys. They spent hours talking about who was cute, who was nice and who they wanted to kiss. I had no interest, and didn’t understand why they did. I got a boyfriend to be like everyone else. I liked my boyfriend Chuck, but he was a friend. We tried kissing but I thought it was gross so we just held hands. I had other boyfriends, but it was to fit in. I wasn’t attracted to any boys at all. I began to wonder what was wrong with me and I started to get depressed.

Then, the summer before my freshman year of high school I kissed Jackie. She was a girl from my junior high who started singing to me on the bus home from school every day, singing about my eyes. It was weird but it made my heart flutter in a way that I’d never felt before. Jackie and I became secret girlfriends. Secret because far as I could tell there had never been a gay person before in the history of the world, and I wasn’t prepared to be the first. There were a few books about gay people that I borrowed from the local library. One was called, The Well of Loneliness. The title really says it all, right? There were no out gay famous people to look up to, no one on tv or in the movies, though there was Liberace and there were rumors about Freddy Mercury, Elton John and David Bowie, but no women. Well, maybe Billie Jean King, but it was all pretty hush hush still. I was in suburban Chicago and I had no role models who were women like me, so I began to transform myself into being more like a boy than a girl. I’m not sure it was conscious. I just know from looking at pictures of myself over the years I can see the changes.

We were taught in school, back in 4th grade when we had sex ed, that only boys and girls dated and later had families. Any deviation from that would result in a life of misery and isolation and you definitely wouldn’t have kids. Later that school year my parents found out about Jackie and me and they told me that if I ever saw her again they’d tell my grandparents. I was young and believed with all my heart that my grandparents loved me unconditionally. However, with my parents telling me that no, they wouldn’t love me if they knew I was gay- doubt crept in. My parents thought I was sick and now I feared that my grandparents would be disgusted with me also. I went deep into the closet.

My family moved to New Mexico that next school year- my 10th grade year. My parents said it was because they were too ashamed to live somewhere where everyone knew I was gay. That was an incredibly heavy weight that I carried for many years. They were embarrassed about who I was. It was a heterosexual world and something was wrong with me because I liked girls. I didn’t know what to do with this and I rebelled. And I got in all kinds of trouble. Trouble in school, trouble outside of school. I was grounded most of my 10th grade year. I lost interest in my studies and quit most sports except softball. My comfort was my guitar and my guitar lessons with my teacher. I’d write songs, sing love songs with all the longing of my 15-year-old self. I would blush in my room when I would sing songs from a male perspective. It was like I was looking at myself from the outside, and I couldn’t reconcile what was on the inside.

One day in February of my sophomore year I cut school. I don’t remember why, but I did. I think I’d maybe done it once or twice before. I was home when the school secretary called to say that I was to be suspended from school. My parents would ‘kill me’, so I decided to run away instead. Not my finest moment, and as a mother now I can only imagine how my parents felt. But I did and I stayed away for two days. My parents called the police and eventually they found me, hiding in a friend’s house. I didn’t want to come home. My parents wanted to cure me of my bad behavior and my homosexuality (which they still hadn’t tied together) and they had me committed to a mental hospital. There were a lot of other teens who identified as queer and were in there for the same reason. We had group therapy everyday as well as individual therapy. I can’t say that I loved this particular time in my life. We attended classes, had to keep daily journals and could have visitors if we did as we were told. I was allowed to have my guitar. We were allowed to smoke, so I started smoking. I was also allowed to leave to go and play on my softball team if I had a good week. It was so odd to be locked up most of the time, but then allowed to go and play. Turns out a lot of girls who play sports were queer. Or wanted to try out kissing girls. I loved getting a day pass so I could go and play with my team.

What I know now about children and teens is that if you shame and ostracize them, their behavior and self-esteem will be affected. My parents weren’t savvy enough back then to know that and looking back I think things might have gone differently throughout my teen years had they known then what they know now.

When I moved out of my parents’ house I cut my hair short. I moved in with my girlfriend, and my parents refused to pay for my college because of it, so I enrolled myself into community college. When I was 19 and living in Arizona, the governor of Arizona rescinded the MLK holiday and it was even more clear that Arizona was no place for anyone who was black, gay, or anything other than straight white people, so I decided to move. I put a map of the US on our wall and threw a dart to pick where to live. The first one landed in Billings Montana and I thought that I’d still find homophobia there, so I threw another dart. It landed smack dab on Berkeley and I flew out a few weeks later to check it out. I loved it. There was an earthquake that first night in my motel, and I took it as a good omen- I arrive and the earth moves! I moved into a studio apartment in West Berkeley and found my people.

When I was 22 I was teaching and building guitars in Berkeley at Subway Guitars. It was a cool scene and I got to hang out all day and practice when no one was at the store. I met a woman there who was putting together a band and wanted me to join the band. I said yes, and it changed the trajectory of my life. One significant way was that she and my other band mate had met the prior summer at an LGBT family camp. I had no idea that any of those letters or words went together! The idea that I, as a lesbian, could ever have a family was an incredible consideration and one that I thought I’d never ever have. They encouraged me to apply to work the following summer, in 1992, and I was blown away! I was hired as the teen counselor, and I loved working with those kids. Teens are a special group of people, and because of the hardships that I’d been through with my family, I wanted to be not just a good counselor to them but a great one. I loved it, and kept doing the job for more than a decade. I would often sit and talk with my group- cause teens love to sit and talk- about what it was like for them growing up with same sex parents. I told them that one day I’d like to have a child and would my child be embarrassed by having two moms? Would they not want to bring their friends over? Would their friends’ parents not let them play at my house? My campers were wonderful and reassuring. One of my kids shyly asked the group if they felt ok having him as a friend because he had both a mom and a dad and felt self-conscious at camp. We all reassured him that it was ok to have a mom and a dad, it wouldn’t change the way we felt about him. What an interesting moment that was! It was my first look at being in the majority as a queer person, and it was surprising how good it felt.

Over the next 10 years I came more into being myself- and the butch woman who I am today. I kept my hair cut short, bleached it blond, started identifying as a butch woman, and toured the country with my little trio. We played on communes, and at folk festivals, on women’s land, and in cafes where the only person who listened ran the coffee machine. Once, when touring through rural Mississippi, we got pretty lost. We found a fire station and as I was getting out of the car my friends stopped me- and we decided that it’d be best to have the most feminine woman among us to go ask for directions. We were in town to play on some women’s land who’d been violently harassed by their neighbors for being gay and we’d come from the bay area to play for them in solidarity. We were in Fort Collins Colorado the day after Matthew Shepard was killed and played at a rally where there were more white folks protesting our being there than the folks who were there to rally around the hate crime that was committed. It was an incredible time and as we grew more into being known as a lesbian folk trio, I learned that there were many, many kinds of queer folk. Some lesbians look like me, and some look like my partner- who passes. We say that someone passes when they can blend into the majority. Libby, my partner, looks queer when we’re both together. Otherwise she blends into the majority, and looks straight. My looks are another story.

One of the biggest issues being a butch woman is the confusion of others. These days the kids at school ask me, Lisa Z are you a boy or a girl? I usually respond by asking them what they think. They will often respond I think you’re a girl but you look like a boy. Or they straight up figure I’m a boy. I’m not embarrassed at all. They’re just trying to figure it out, and in the end they usually say that it doesn’t matter. It’s great and I welcome their honesty. Adults are another matter. They’re not polite enough to just ask and they make assumptions. They usually assume I’m a man, and it’s evident when at a restaurant and I’m always given the check. Or I get to taste the wine that’d just been opened, for approval. It’s something that I’ve gotten used to in the last 10 years or so. The best was when I was pregnant, and I was still assumed to be a man. A miracle of a man, for sure, since I was as big as a house with my over 10-pound son in my belly.

My gender is fluid. The queer community is trying to introduce themselves with their preferred pronoun these days and I don’t really have a preferred one. Some of my favorite comments from students at school is, ‘he’s a girl’, when referring to me. I just love it because that’s how I feel.

However, when I go to the bathroom I’m fully rooted in the feminine. I have spent my life using the women’s room, when given an option. It’s now become something that I have to be aware of every single time. See, I make women uncomfortable when I’m in the ladies’ room. Women who are already in the bathroom always point me towards the men’s room. And the men want me to go to the women’s room. I was recently on a vacation with some friends in Northern Ireland. Men would yell at me from across the pub that I was going into the wrong bathroom. My friends were blown away- they don’t see me like that and had never had that experience as straight people. There are women who, when they walk in, turn around to double check the sign on the door, and then proceed to wait outside till I leave- that just happened on Solano in Berkeley. In Europe, it got so bad that I eventually used the mens’ room for the rest of the vacation- making my friends feel awkward because they’re not used to me going into the bathroom with them!

When I’m here at CBT I’m very comfortable. I have to admit though, that for the first few years when I worked here I only used the bathrooms behind the bima. But that was me, and I was making my own assumptions, just like I don’t enjoy when others make them about me! I was assuming that this community wouldn’t want or welcome a dyke on the bima- that I’d be too ‘other’, in this heteronormative space. But I couldn’t have been more wrong! Years ago, I was a member of a big synagogue in Berkeley and though there are plenty of lesbians over there I felt invisible. No one greeted me when I came in, introduced themselves or made an effort to invite my involvement. As the weeks and months and years went by, I started to lean towards CBT and away from Berkeley because here at CBT I’ve felt just as welcome as I do at Camp It Up. CBT is my home, and I’m proud to have you all as my community.

Like Rabbi Chabon said in Tikvah Talk, we’re in a heteronormative world. And around here, a heteronormative white Christian world. As Jews we already know what being othered is like, and as a lesbian Jew I encourage you all to keep being as welcoming to anyone else who walks through our doors as you all were to me, no matter their gender, color, ability, or nationality.

This month I celebrate Pride and feel grateful for my family and my community. My parents are some of my strongest allies now, and my mom said that when she read the Tikvah Talk column that Rabbi Chabon wrote about me being the speaker for our Pride Shabbat, that she got goosebumps and wished that she could be here with us tonight. I have found over the last dozen years that this is a community that I should never have assumed wouldn’t be welcoming. I thank you all for being my allies, and Shabbat shalom.

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“Baruch She’amar V’Haya HaOlam.” Blessed is God who spoke and the world came to be.¹

These words, composed by our rabbis, are part of our Shabbat morning liturgy. There’s a certain symmetry to that, isn’t there? How was our world created? For Jews… through speech. Through language, verbal wrestling, and healthy arguments. Through ideas, and through attempts to speak our minds in ways that would evolve as our world evolved.

God continued, in our creation story, to fashion distinctions among what had been tohu va’vohu – unformed and void. Light was separated from darkness, sky from water, moon and sun and stars from sky.² And then as we know of course, the jewel in creation’s crown. Human beings, who would live in harmony, with moral consciousness in the Garden of Eden. Life would be lush in its beauty and ease. Although there was the small matter of this one tree whose fruit God forbade them to taste. Every other tree was fine, but that one…

We all probably know the outcome of that part of the story. Eve, then Adam inevitably ate from the ever alluring Tree of Knowledge … as most of us would under similar circumstances! In so doing, they too became instigators of speech. They created the Torah’s first question.

It was a single word: “Ayecha?”³ Where are you?

Like children who break a precious possession they had been told not to play with, they were frightened, these first humans… and they hid among the trees of the Garden.

“Ayecha?” God called to them. Now God knew perfectly well where they were. That wasn’t the question. The real question was not “where have you run on the outside?” but “where have you run on the inside? Where have your fears and your sense of dread exiled you?”

Ayecha. Where?

Adam and Eve were already a long way from Eden. They just didn’t know it yet. On this holiest of nights, as we step back to consider the time between last Yom Kippur and this one, the truth begins to burn through. We are a long way from Eden as well.

II

It was just about a year ago, wasn’t it? That we stood here together feeling the first seismic shifts. The first earthquake-like rumblings and intimations that our nation, always a long way from Edenic utopia, was about to fall even farther. What a time we have been through, and are living through still. A year filled with everything we acknowledge and ask forgiveness for tonight: rancor and misunderstanding, bigotry, acts of violence and worse.

Consider the words of the “Al Chet” we chanted earlier. It’s amazing how many of these phrases have their roots in the language we use. “The harm we have caused in Your world through the words of our mouths… and harm we have caused in Your world through careless speech. (The) harm we have caused through gossip and rumor; through insincere apologies, and with a slanderous tongue.”⁴

There is an old story of a woman who goes to her rabbi before Yom Kippur to confess, in a manner of speaking, that she is somewhat of a gossip. “Although rabbi, I like to think of it more as a valuable public service. I hear things that people should know. It’s my special pleasure,” she shrugs, “and really how much harm can it do? After all, it’s not as though I were hitting or kicking someone, God forbid.”

“Oh?” the rabbi responded. He handed her a pillow and said to her, “Take this pillow home with you, and tomorrow I want you to open it up and scatter its feathers all around town. When the feathers are gone, come back and see me. We’ll talk.”

And here she thought she was going to get a lecture! This would be much easier. So, as in all good Jewish folktales, she did just as the rabbi instructed, and went back to see him a few days later with an empty pillowcase. “Good work,” said the rabbi, very impressed. “And now, I want you to go back through our town, gather all the feathers up again, and replace them in the pillowcase.”

“But rabbi, that’s impossible!” she exclaimed. “Who knows where each of those feathers is now? Who knows what all the people who scooped them up are doing with them?!”

The rabbi just nodded sagely and looked the woman in the eyes. “Now, about your gossip,” he said. That was the day the woman made a beginning in breaking her lifelong habit. Over time, she learned to take care with her words. She learned what Judaism has always taught about why gossip and rumor, insincere apologies and careless speech are indeed so harmful. “The tongue is compared to an arrow,” our rabbis teach, “because if a person draws a sword to kill his fellow human, the intended victim can beg mercy and the attacker can change his mind and return the sword to its sheath. But an arrow, once it has been shot and begun its journey, even if the shooter wants to stop it, he (or she) cannot”⁵

It began with marginalization of our Muslim neighbors, and then extended to Hispanic people. Soon it was all immigrants… followed by all refugees… and no reasonable amount of explaining that we are all descendants of those who came here from somewhere else, seeking something better seemed to make any difference. Next, hateful rhetoric turned its focus to the disabled. Then to LGBT people whose rights have been fought for so long, and whose victories are so recent. It goes on… to African-Americans and women. And to Jews. Through this long, dark season we have been living the poem of Martin Niemöller, Protestant pastor and concentration camp survivor who famously wrote:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak (for me).

Who would be next, many of us wondered. Who would be made a mockery of, who would be cruelly stereotyped, who would be the next victim of a hate crime because words were left all over town claiming that this person, that family, this community didn’t matter. Because feathers were picked up and passed from hand to angry, disenfranchised hand, whispering: “these others are the reasons you have less than you should. If not for them, you would be prosperous and safe. You would recognize your country again. They are your problem.” All it took was one receptive ear after another, and one more mouth to pass it on. And every day it happened – every day it happens – it debases us all.

It debases us especially. Not only because of the pain and scourge of antiSemitism, fully out of the woodwork, so alive and so well. But also, because we are among the world’s people who know exactly where slander and malicious, inaccurate speech can lead. It has led there once. It can again. We have to know that.

We are exhorted through the prophet Isaiah to be or l’goyim – a light to the nations.⁶ This is not a way to claim superiority; moral or otherwise. It is a way of reminding us that we have a particular history filled with oppression and dispersions, as well as with wisdom and and creativity, and a certain resilience after it all. We have not only the ability, but also an obligation based on our own past pain, our own experience as strangers in a strange land, to draw empathy from those wells. Consider for just a moment, the words of an Iraqi woman who speaks anonymously to protect her life. She is a rape victim and former prostitute who has dedicated herself to rescuing vulnerable women in her country from the brothels that traffic them:

“I am hurt witnessing this,” she says. “(But I will continue my work). I am now confident and strong. I know that I am a person. My wound, my deep wound, is also my strength, because it makes me help others. Those who bear scars must help the wounded.”⁷ 

In much the same way, even as the world grows bigger and more complicated, even as grey areas multiply, the Jewish response to “who will they come for next?” must be “No one. Not on our watch.”

But tonight we are still clinging to veils of exhaustion, anger, helplessness and inaction; myself included. That’s how powerful hateful language is; contrary to the old childhood adage about sticks and stones, words do hurt. They hurt so much that tonight, on Kol Nidre, our fears and our sense of dread still hold part of our souls back in exile. Tonight, on Kol Nidre, we are still in hiding. And tonight God asks us: “Ayecha? Where are you?”

III

In “Leaves of Grass” Walt Whitman wrote “that the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.”⁸ He wasn’t speaking of Yom Kippur, but he may as well have been. On this holiest, most solemn of days, we are taught that “God opens the book of our days, and what is written there proclaims itself, for every human hand leaves its mark, an imprint like no other.”⁹ What will our imprint be? How will it, and how will we be remembered?

These are the questions we wrestle with on as Yom Kippur begins, every bit as much as we have wrestled with the year’s poisonous words and with the deep, unhealed divide at the heart of our nation. Are these cracks new? Or have they been here longer than we’ve understood, and simply needed the right conditions to widen and grow? To fan the flames, exposing our own worst selves. For all these failures of judgment and will, God of forgiveness – forgive us, pardon us, lead us to atonement.¹⁰

Can it be different? Can we make it so? “There’s a crack in everything,” songwriter Leonard Cohen intoned. “That’s how the light gets in.”¹¹

How will we bring in the light?

Can our words be words of healing… words of hope?

Can our anger be righteous – motivating us to fight our way towards better times?

Can our scars lead us to help the wounded?

“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief,” Rabbi Tarfon taught. “Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.”¹² 

The powerful play goes on… somehow. It always does. Let us help it go on, but better. Now.

IV

Baruch She’Amar V’Haya HaOlam, Baruch Hu. Blessed is God who spoke and the world came to be.

We too have the power to speak new worlds into being — every time we stand with each other, every time we allow the divisive words we hear to spread hatred… and every time we don’t. Every time we use the gift of language to create bridges, instead of walls.

May the words of our mouths serve as a tool of uplift, and not destruction. May we bring our own souls out of exile and begin the great work ahead. And may the imprint we leave be one that reflects our best selves, as lovers of justice, and pursuers of peace.

Ken Y’hi Ratzon/ May it be God’s will.

1 Shabbat Morning Liturgy, Mishkan Tefillah p. 94 [212].

2 Genesis 1: 1-8 (paraphrased).

3 Genesis 3:9

4 Mishkan Hanefesh, pp. 86-90.

5 “Midrash Tehillim 120,” ed. Buber, p. 503.

6 Isaiah 49:6

7 “Letter from Baghdad: Out of Sight,” Rania Abouzeid, The New Yorker, October 5, 2015.

8 166. O Me! O Life! “Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman, 1892.

9 Gates of Repentance, p. 107/ Mishkan HaNefesh p. 174.

10 Mishkan HaNefesh p. 87.

11 “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen.

12 Pirkei Avot; commentary on Micah 6:8.

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A story:

Many years ago, whenever a catastrophe threatened his community, the Chasidic Master known as the Ba’al Shem Tov would go into the woods and light a fire. He would say a special prayer and the catastrophe would be averted.

In the next generation the Ba’al Shem Tov’s disciple, the Maggid of Mezrich would follow the same practice. He went to the same place in the forest, where he told God that while he did not know how to light the fire, he could still recite the prayer. And again, the catastrophe was averted.

Later, his disciple Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov, went into the forest to save his people. “I do not know how to light the fire,” he pleaded with God, “and I have forgotten the prayer, but I can find the place and that must be sufficient.” And it was sufficient, and again, the catastrophe was averted.

And now we say: “God… we are unable to light the fire. We do not know the prayer, and cannot even find the place in the forest. All we can do is to tell the story. And that must be sufficient.”

How will we tell the story one day? Of Columbine, of Sandy Hook, of Charleston, and now of Orlando?

This Shabbat is one of mourning for the 49 people, each one created b’tzelem Elohim—in God’s image – senselessly murdered early last Sunday morning in the gay nightclub Pulse. We mourn too for the injured, and for the grief stricken loved ones left behind to bear unimaginable sorrow.

What was their crime? Being out for a night of dancing and drinking and fun with their partners and friends? Being where they were? No. They were killed for being who they were.

Now in all likelihood, we didn’t know them. We probably know people like them – people like Edward Sotomayor Jr. who managed an LGBT travel agency and worked to make travel everywhere safer for everyone. People like Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, a two-time cancer survivor who was out for the night with her son, and saved his life in her final moments. Or like Darryl Roman Burt II, a natural leader who was always willing to help others.

We didn’t know them, but we know. As Jews especially, we know what means to have a history of marginalization and oppression. We know what it feels like to believe that the worst stereotyping and injustices are behind us, only to find that there is still far too much work to be done in that regard.

Yesterday, in what turned out to be a beautiful antidote to all this, we took Jonah to the mikvah to make his Jewish status official among our people. Michael, reminiscing about his own mikvah seven years and four days before, told me that a friend of ours — also Jewish and part of the family that first drew Michael towards conversion — a friend known for his dry wit said: “Congratulations. Now a lot more people hate you for no reason.”

As Jews we also know what it means to cherish a tradition that tells us not to stand idly by the blood of our neighbor, and reminds us that the destruction of a single life is like destroying a whole world, just as the saving of a life is amounts to saving an entire world. For this reason if for no other, we will fight our way back towards hope, in time. We will use our voices as our consciences dictate. Opportunities abound to contact our representatives and express our opinions, to sign petitions, to join the chorus of reason amidst the insanity. We will use our passion as Reform Jews to identify with our movement’s long held position on gun violence. Years before this era of mass shootings, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, then the president of the Union of Reform Judaism wrote, “… We need to see the control of guns not only as a political problem but also as a solemn religious obligation. Our gun-flooded society has turned weapons into idols, and… the only appropriate response to idolatry is sustained moral outrage.”

All this – these actions, these commitments — will come in time. They are finding us already, thankfully.

But for one night – for this night, this Shabbat – we come together in community and we mourn. We weep for another round of tragic, violent loss of life. We wonder how it came to this, and we fear for our collective future.

And, dare I say it: we are TIRED. Grateful as I am, I am also tired of the messages flooding my inbox in the aftermath of these shootings with the heading “Resources for the Shabbat after Orlando… after Newtown, after Arizona and Oregon.” I am so tired of writing such headings on the first page of sermons. I’m tired of the seemingly endless cycle of shock, tears, outrage, vigils… and then a shaky return to normalcy, until.

We’re all tired. We are emotionally and spiritually worn out from hearing about the most recent one, agonizing over when and where the next one will take place. We are oversaturated by media, social and otherwise, yet unable to look away for fear of hiding our heads in the sand.

So for this one night, we mourn. We pause and sink into this sanctuary of comfort and peace with broken hearts and deep gratitude. We lean on each other, and we rest, just as Shabbat bids us to. The sacred duty to act, will be waiting for us when night falls tomorrow. And again the next day. And the next.

How will we tell this story?

I pray that one day it will only be that. I pray that the time is closer than it seems now when we will have to explain to our children from the beginning, the very concept of mass shootings of civilians with assault weapons. What they were, what they meant, what they stole from us and how they finally stopped. Because like apartheid, the Cold War, cassette tapes… they will have no idea.

May the day come indeed, speedily and soon, that with work and hope and love, we will join in the fight together with our brothers and sisters, and this catastrophe will be no more than a dim and terrible remembrance. We will tell the story, and that will be all.

And it will be sufficient.

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And maybe, just maybe, God still hasn’t. On RH morning 5777, I step forward into this family tradition, and into a brand new year, with my hopes and dreams for my son.

Jonah, this letter is for you.

My sweet boy,The first thing I want to tell you is the thing I don’t have to tell you. It was a long road for the three of us to find each other and become a family. We waited for you and listened for you, even when it seemed that no one was hearing our call. Rosh Hashanah is unique in that it echoes the experience of all of us who have waited and listened, and who may be waiting still, to discern the call that will bring us someplace utterly new.

You have taught us so much already in your young life about what responding to that call means. Word that you were on your way first came to us in the form of a call in fact! A phone call on February 5, just before Shabbat. A baby due in San Antonio, Texas in early April. Would we? Was it really you? How could something that had taken so long suddenly be happening so fast?!

I promptly catapulted into the next phase of navigating a great change… the one affectionately known as dancing as fast as we can to avoid becoming more than we are! What had your dad and I been thinking?! We had no supplies in the house, and frankly didn’t even know what half of the things people swore we needed were! What about our marriage, which was and is such a source of comfort and support? All along we had shared great faith that raising a child, something we both dearly wanted, would only expand our joy. But what if it didn’t? What if the stress and the inevitable bickering I had heard about, and in some cases witnessed, among my friends and their partners during their years of raising young children got the better of us? Was this all a huge mistake? What if we never saw a first run movie again??!
These days I shake my head and marvel at my early dance of questions. But there was something real at the core of them. Think of the words we chanted earlier in our service, before the Amidah:

Am I awake?
Am I prepared?
Are you listening to my prayer?
Can you hear my voice?
Can you understand?
Am I awake?
Am I prepared?¹

So maybe it wasn’t just about being ready to receive you with blankets and pacifiers, onesies and board books… wonderful and yes, necessary as those things have been. It was really about being awake in the deepest sense for our biggest transformation yet. It was about being strong yet tender enough to receive you. To paraphrase the words of writer Anne Patchett, saying yes would mean “beginning the second half of our lives, the one that would be lived with you.” ²

It sounds simplistic to say that our first look at your face quelled all those worries, but something like that did happen. New worries would come, but oh those first moments! The two of us taking you in together: expertly swaddled, eyes closed, with you guessed it… a full head of dark hair! And the most peaceful expression we had ever seen.

I held you for the first time… a tiny, vulnerable, yet tenacious new life. The hole in my heart, brought on by the seemingly endless cycle of cautious optimism followed by heartbreak and disappointment – all those years, I never knew that hole had come to be shaped exactly like you. Yet another wise Jewish writer for the ages, Shel Silverstein, gave us a story called The Missing Piece among other classics. Like that incomplete circle that travels far and wide in search of the piece that would make it complete, surprising discoveries would await us. Some would help us roll along happily, others would hurt. But for those moments, we three were whole.

We touched your cheeks and softly spoke the words that would be our beginning. “Hello, Jonah.”

Together, we would write a new chapter. We have learned from you that sometimes the story as we never imagined it is even better than the story as we always imagined it. The way we wanted it, the way we assumed would it would unfold for us. It took some time – a few hours at least (!) as we threw our luggage together and frenziedly called Judy to figure out a plan starting NOW (… you know Judy; she was one of the first people to hold you when you arrived home to B’nai Tikvah!) – to make peace with not being there for your birth. How I hoped – how strongly I held that image in my mind’s eye – that I would see you come into the world. And now? I do see you come into the world. Every day.

We are taught that as our people journeyed through the wilderness towards the land of Israel, in the ark that accompanied them were not only the tablets with God’s commandments inscribed, but also the broken tablets… the fragments left after Moses shattered them in anger when he beheld the Golden Calf and his people’s easy betrayal. Our rabbis liken this to how each of us carries broken shards from our past with us as we journey forward. Even today… a day we reach so mightily for hope and renewal. There are unrealized dreams and broken fragments on all our paths, and certainly on our path that led us to you. Your being here doesn’t change that, any more than our being there for you will shield you from what will be your own losses or unmet hopes. I can tell you though, that you make the broken pieces matter less somehow. You’re like a melody playing overthem, and the closer we listen the more our attention is brought to each note of clarity and redemption you bring us.

Together, we will listen for your song. Every time we sing you a lullaby that was sung to us… every time we read you a long cherished book from our own childhoods, we are making old words new. And that’s what we’re all doing here this Rosh Hashanah morning. That is the essence of teshuvah – of growth and return intertwined. We plumb these age old prayers and melodies for new understandings and personal significance. We rest in the sacredness of our community, knowing that we’ve all gotten it wrong in some way this past year. We stretch and we strive and emerge ready to sing a new song… to God, to each other, to ourselves. Each of these songs will have a broken piece in it somewhere… a line whose resolution is still to come.

So what does it mean, Jonah — to dream big and beautiful dreams for your child? For any of our children? For all of them. To borrow from the inimitable, dulcet tones of Morgan Freeman, “your every dream for the future beats in the heart of your child. It’s how we’re made… from generation to generation.” ³

I was leaning in the doorway with you in my arms and the Olympics on mute one summer night, and there over your head was Simone Biles – a name no one save a few had known before this summer, but we know it now! Watching her slice through the air – running, twirling, giving the phrase “poetry in motion” the meaning it’s supposed to have! Bringing a great dream to fruition. That doesn’t have to mean becoming a world class gymnast — though if it does, know that your dad and I will be the first ones to spot you, and will always be there to cheer you on! What I want more for you though is what one of my favorite writers said in an early novel: “to figure out what it is you hope for, and to have the courage to live inside that hope.”⁴

I wish authenticity for you – the courage to be exactly who you are in a culture that hasn’t made it any easier through the years. I wish you a soul filled with wonder, and a heart that stretches to take in the beauty of the world and the despair within it. And I wish you the ability to reshape your corner of this world, in your own way. Try not to doubt the dignity and significance of small gestures and acts of lovingkindness. Some of them only seem small. All of them matter.

I dream of encouraging you towards strength and self-awareness, because there will be disappointments, and some will leave scars. That’s so hard to believe now, as I witness your joy to be alive, your pleasure when being read to and held and lifted high in the air, your laser attention on the faces around you, and even on your hands the day that through careful study you realized you control them – they are yours! Your sheer enthusiasm for your own changes leaves me stunned and humbled. Most adults can’t do what you do. Each night when I put you to bed, I exult in all you have dreamed into being that day. Reaching and cooing, kicking and shouting and laughing. But a part of me aches too, knowing that you’ll never be exactly who you were the next morning, and the one after that and all the rest of your mornings to come. It’s no wonder that the gifted playwright Tony Kushner reflected that “the world only spins forward… (and) there’s a kind of painful progress… longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.”⁶

You on the other hand, have no such ambivalence. Even when you roll in the wrong direction and end up too close for comfort to the bookshelf, though you howl in surprise, it never occurs to you to stop moving. That is faith. You’ll bump up against the hard parts of life, and it will hurt. May you always hold onto that faith in yourself, and move forward anyway. Keep dreaming ahead.

And what kind of a world do I dream you’ll move into?

One with more kindness, less divisiveness, fear. One that blesses you with the grounding of a community, which the three of us are so fortunate to have already within our remarkable B’nai Tikvah. There will always be tragedy, ignorance, apathy and worse. Just as surely as there will be jubilance, laughter and now that you’re here… better times. Because Jonah, there really are times that the forces of good and intelligence and justice win the day. May you feel yourself a part of that most of all.

On this Rosh Hashanah, I wish for you the world I wish for all our children, and for all of us: one that brims with renewal, one that lights the way for our own transformation.

Jonah, my baby… my dove. Do you know that even when I’m not holding you, I sway back and forth when I pray now, just as though you were in my arms? You really are a sign that God hasn’t given up on the world. Don’t you give up on it either.

Don’t any of you give up.

L’Shana Tovah.

1 Noah Aronson

2 Anne Patchett, Truth & Beauty, p. 252.

3 Democratic National Convention, Thursday July 28, 2016.

4 Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams, p. 299.

5 underlined words: Deepha Mehta, director of “Water.”

6 Tony Kushner, Angels in America, page # to come.

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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.” ¹

These words are from Israel’s best known and most prolific poet, Yehuda Amichai. They remind us in a beautifully crafted way that the phenomenon of seeing and being seen, what we look for and what we find at any given moment depends on our point of origin. How we train our own eyes, and what we focus on. With so much tugging at the margins of our limited attention – whether Amichai’s Roman arches of history or the daily act of nourishing ourselves and our families – where and how do our eyes come to rest? What stays with us, and what goes right by as though it had never been?

I’m reminded here of a modern midrash on our Exodus from Egypt. The story told concerns two Israelites who among their exultant counterparts, complained to each other about how muddy the trek was. One complained of his hunger, the other of his thirst. They were carried along on the great tide of redemption with their eyes cast downward the entire time. In a very real sense, they missed the whole thing.

In greeting each other with the words Shana Tovah U’Metukah, let us share in the hope that this be a year of vision insight – of being there for each other, and truly seeing all that matters most.

Last August while we were visiting family on the East Coast, a meteor shower was predicted that very week. It was the kind of meteor shower with minute-by-minute updates and intense anticipation. We spent a few nights walking in open spaces under the cover of night, craning our necks to see what we could see. My husband, who just happens to be one of the most patient people I know, gazed steadily at the sky. I did my best, but inevitably my mind wandered and I would shift my eyes to look at something else. Wouldn’t you know it: at those precise moments I would hear him say “there’s one! There’s another one!” “Where?” I would demand, looking up again. But the moment had passed. The meteor was gone, with only my inattention to blame.

On the way home that night, we talked about a television astronomy program that Michael remembered from years ago, called (impossibly, for reasons we still can’t figure out) “The Star Hustler.” The host would take viewers on an adapted tour through the cosmos, throw in some educational tidbits, and at the end of each show would say to his viewers: “And remember – keep looking up.”

Like most things that sound simple enough, it isn’t… not really. In part it has to do with holding our gaze skyward for long moments where it feels like nothing is happening. How long does it take before your attention ebbs and your mind starts racing? It’s in those long moments though, as we keep our attention fixed and as we keep looking up, that the extraordinary happens, and we see it.

The other thing that happens in those moments is that somehow the ordinary becomes extraordinary. It’s a phenomenon that lies beyond words. Even Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the most noted theologians of the last century reflected that “the stirring in our hearts when watching the star-studded sky is something no language can declare.”²

Looking up becomes its own reward.

On the threshold of a new year, I want to share just a few ways with you tonight that looking up has the power to enrich us, and to change us for the better.

II

We don’t have to look far for the first way. It happens over and over in our own synagogue. Thanks to the hard work of architect Peter Golze and the vision of so many, one of our greatest treasures is not a piece in repose under glass in a museum, or anything we have to go far to find. It’s our very own B’nai Tikvah amphitheater. How many times have guests stepped into this space for Kiddush and marveled, “this is so beautiful! Does the view ever get old?” As a matter of fact, I asked something like this two and a half years ago. And I can now give the answer that I was given. “No. It really doesn’t.”

I’ll tell you the other view that never gets old. Looking up at you sitting on the benches…. during a Havdalah ceremony sheltered by the branches of our beloved oak tree that led us to talk about darkness, and all it symbolizes. Or at a recent service planned and led by congregants, infused by the principles of the modern Mussar movement. We all looked up that morning, and celebrated the gracefulness of the sunlight, the perfect balance of breeze and stillness, silence and song. It wasn’t just our prayer that was animated as we absorbed the view. It was also a sense of shared purpose, and an affirmation of the dignity of our relationships with each other. Our attention was pulled to the gratitude we feel when we remember that right in our own backyard is a place that encourages all this and more. After all, it was a prophet, albeit one who began from a stubborn and shortsighted place who “looked up and saw Israel encamped tribe by tribe. The spirit of God came upon (this prophet Balaam… and) he said: “How fair are your tents O Jacob/ Your dwellings O Israel.”³ All these years later, our Religious School kids open their services in the amphitheater with these same words of “Ma Tovu” … as they find their own ways of looking up.

III

Like all good stories that happen to be true, what takes place outside takes place inside too. Tomorrow morning at our Children’s Service, Keren Smith — our Director of Education — will be sharing a story about an apple who on Rosh Hashanah, discovers its star inside. That shouldn’t give too much away! Our own star inside – inside our Sanctuary that is – also serves as a source of visual and spiritual inspiration. Going back centuries, the Magen David – Star of David – has played a central role in defining Jewish identity. It has been painfully used against us, only to rise from the ashes with beauty and pride. In synagogue life it reminds us of the sacredness of the space we’re in, before the rabbi speaks a word or the cantor sings a note. It reminds us who we are. Our star just happens to shine above us, heightening our awareness of the majesty of every season… as long as we keep looking up. Sometimes it seems that it is bearing witness to our lives; from B’nai Mitzvah to funerals, from Shabbat services to concerts and community lectures and yes: the occasional Red Carpet Evening! Our community is growing, and our path is exciting. One of our own congregants put it beautifully when she reflected that she “keeps her eyes open when saying the Shema aloud during services, and looks directly at our Star of David as a symbol of her family’s Jewish roots, and of her gratefulness to be able to call B’nai Tikvah my Jewish home – now and for many generations to come. And THAT,” she concluded, “is something that I never want to be distracted from.”⁴

A few Sundays ago I met with our kindergarten class in that same Sanctuary. They had visited it with their teacher the week before, and they had some questions! Their identification of the star up above was instant, but they were most fascinated by the ner tamid – the eternal light! Something about the idea that it never goes out held their attention and didn’t let go. With wide eyes, one of our kindergartners asked: “Was the Eternal Light here before I was born?”

“Oh honey,” I wanted to say. “Yes it was.” You know better than anyone, don’t you… how to keep looking up in order to find and feel what is sweet and mysterious. And you know that looking up can turn our whole world on its axis. I no longer see only the Ner Tamid when I look up. In that flame I also see those young, inquisitive faces… that Pintele Yid. The Jewish Spark.

IV

There is one more instance of looking up to reflect on tonight, and it’s one that will bind us all together in a very short time. The Rosh Hashanah morning Shofar service and the narrative it symbolizes is a central shared memory, one we are blessed to experience again and again with the years. It’s actually a practice that can be traced back to the Torah. We are told that when the Israelites heard its sound break through the thick cloud at the base of Mt. Sinai as God’s commandments were revealed, they trembled with awe.⁵ Imagine looking up to see that! Tomorrow from a somewhat more modest bimah, we will hear the shofar’s call once more. And in a sense, we will see its call as well.

We need that focal point in order to let these sounds truly enter us. That’s something our people struggled mightily with as they journeyed through the wilderness: how to remember their experience of God in such transcendent moments once they were over. On one of our most significant days – the celebration of the New Year — the shofar’s sound will be heard not from on high, nor from the veil of a dense cloud, or a curtain behind which the great and powerful Oz supposedly speaks. It will be heard from one of us. Yet some of my favorite insights about this sacred, wordless call are visual ones. The 19th century Chasidic Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (“COAT-SSKK!”) taught: “Bend! Dare to bend. The curvature of the Shofar is kafuf, or bent; it is bent to teach us to bend our stubbornness and our pride.” That’s just in case any of us are sitting here thinking that we invented negative patterns or ways of missing the mark! Here’s another recollection I’ve never forgotten: “The shofar service brings back such powerful memories. As a child I recall watching the old guy blowing the shofar on the bimah; in retrospect, he was probably younger than I am now. His face would get redder and redder – I would sit there wondering if he was going to make it!”

For him, those feelings of suspense and of being a link in the chain of generations began with keeping his eye on the sounds. Is it a paradox that we need to keep looking up in order to hear this most powerful call? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that threads of connection are everywhere we look: there in the meteor shower, and in the image of the man carrying home fruits and vegetables for his family, resting beside a great Roman arch. There when in the words of the Psalmist, we “lift our eyes to the mountains” and ask for help.⁶ There when our minds come to rest, our voices come together and our Sanctuary star truly becomes ours. There in the shofar’s voice as it travels from inside out, and up. And then inside once more. There when all of this brings us into even greater connection with each other, and with God’s ineffable presence.

How we respond of course, is up to us.

On this Rosh Hashanah Eve, as we stand ready to enter into all that is yet possible, my hope for all of us is that we keep looking up, and that the gifts of insight and gratitude will be ours. Let us cast our lot not with the pundits and predictors, the naysayers and cynics, but rather with the prophets and the poets… one of whom said it best: “Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering ‘It will be better.’ ”⁷

May we make it so.

1 “Tourists,” by Yehuda Amichai

2 Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, p. 4.

3 Numbers 24:5

4 Tina Guterman, “My CBT,” September 23, 2015.

5 Exodus 19:16

6 Psalm 121:1, paraphrased.

7 Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Foresters.”

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One line. No response. Then two lines. Nothing. She might as well have been chanting to an empty room. By the third line, even though she knew she shouldn’t, she was beginning to get a little restless, thinking of everything else she still had to do to get ready for Yom Kippur. This was a sad situation, but what was the point? What was she doing here?

Still, she dutifully continued chanting. And then she saw them. In the corners of the man’s unseeing eyes. Like a candle at the end of a dark hallway. There were tears.

My friend went on to be a congregational rabbi, a teacher, a bee-keeper, a mentor. My mentor, in fact. A mother of five, a grandmother of one. A long, eventful rabbinate full of wisdom… full of stories and songs. But this was the experience she never forgot. That room, with its motionless form. Those unseeing eyes. Her own unsure voice. His tears.

We’ve been talking a lot about forward motion over these High Holidays. About finding the courage to take the first steps forward into a new journey, and what we discover as we go. About journeys like the one Abraham and Isaac took up the mountain, so dark and foreboding that they defy any easy understandings. And tomorrow we’ll finish with a reflection on the one who it could be said, travels furthest of all. Without giving away any more than that… think whales.

That movement … that motion comes in subtler ways as well. Some of us have begun the difficult process of mending a relationship, of exploring different ways of reacting and responding where we would normally be on guard and defensive, unmoving. We have been making room in our services for different settings of our usual melodies. We have been shifting, all this long while, turning towards humility, towards repentance, towards our better selves, which are also constantly moving, it seems. Further from us? Closer to us? We don’t know yet.

Tonight, we pause. We stop moving, stop working, stop analyzing, even if just for right now. We sit in stillness on this holiest night of the year

and.

we

just…

stop.

My friend’s long ago question “what am I doing here?” could belong to any of us tonight. What are we doing here?

We are here to listen. As one of the protagonists on the long concluded and keenly missed television series “Six Feet Under” said to his deceased father, who the family regularly conversed with, “oh it CAN’T be that simple.” And his father’s response: “What if it is?”

It’s not just a slogan for pedestrian safety, you see… for crossing the street. It’s for any of us crossing over into someplace or something new. And tonight, that means all of us. We stop. Look. And above all, we listen.

We listen to the haunting, centuries old melody of Kol Nidre. And for many of us, that is enough. What are we doing here? It’s Kol Nidre! It seems impossible that one ancient chant evokes our deepest longings, dreams and regrets. But this one does. Our Torah scrolls themselves stand as witnesses to these things, as Kol Nidre finds us. I recently learned from my colleague, Rabbi Jonathan Blake, that “in almost every sign language in the world, to indicate the past, you point behind you, and to indicate the future, you point in front of you. But in Chinese sign language, the action is reversed. You indicate the past by pointing in front of you, and the future by pointing behind you. Why? Because the future is hidden. You can always see the past.” (Rabbi Jonathan Blake, “Rosh Hashanah 5775: This Day of Remembering.”)

Maybe that’s the pain… and the poignancy… if we really do pause and allow those less than comfortable feelings to sink in. Kol Nidre lays the past bare and asks us to see the vows we didn’t keep, the goals we didn’t fulfill. Our more tarnished, less idealized selves are on display, and it is so very hard to see ourselves and to be seen by others in that light. In these quiet moments so filled with hope and yearning, we make room beside us for the simple truth of how hard it is to admit to vows not kept, goals unfulfilled, potential unmet. How do we begin to forgive ourselves?

Here I’m reminded of a pause during a walk I once took with a fellow rabbinic student. I was about to be ordained, and she had been a rabbi for almost a year, so I figured she knew her stuff. As I waxed on about all that I was afraid of, she listened for a while, and eventually we found a bench where we could watch the river and the cars whizzing by, which any New York City water view seems to include.

“Now, what are you really afraid of?” she asked

Before I could give it any more thought I said, “That I’ll disappoint people.” Immediately a lump rose in my throat, the kind that tells you you’ve gotten to the core of it. My friend nodded.

“Well,” she said, “I have news for you. You will disappoint people. Sometimes that will happen.”

“Oh come on,” I responded. “You – you’re great at this! How have you – as a rabbi – disappointed people?!”

She thought for a while and finally turned to me, puzzled. And she said:

“You mean… today?”

I don’t have to tell you she was right. Or that her words were a gift I have returned to again and again through the years. This was… this is a model of being in the world that reminds us all that we will disappoint… and be disappointed. We will soar, and we will crash. And we will survive these things. As we acknowledge the failings of our past, the disappointments, the promises that did not bloom, we are also, paradoxically, making room for better ones to grow in their place.

We listen for images of God that are foreboding and majestic. And we’re not disappointed. Or we are. I think here of people I’ve listened to over the years who genuinely struggle with all we say about God, all we say that God is, during this time of year. To say nothing of how difficult it can be to puzzle out the right words the rest of the year! But on the High Holidays, God can seem especially authoritarian and distant… just when we need that Divine Presence to be the still, small voice within us. Recording, recounting, sealing our fate… the bravest among us struggle even as we listen, and that has always been so. For those who are ambivalent about God at the best of times. For those who have been genuinely hurt by the religious training of your early years, revolving around images of God as celestial taskmaster. Are we throwing such images right back to you, at the time you need it least?

Can you – can we all – find a place for these all-powerful images? Can we allow them to help us focus in on the intensity, the urgency of this Kol Nidre night? How can they help us to acknowledge, and to feel the truth of what we mean when chant – or even hum – Avinu Malkeinu, and when we pray the words of U’netaneh Tokef? It’s one of the hardest and bravest acts there is: letting go of that illusory world where it all makes sense and we’re in ultimate control. Where the righteous flourish in immediate, visible ways and the less righteous are punished just as they should be. Although who was it who said “you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do?” (Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird, p. 22.)

Let these images of God envelop you. Lean on them, where you can. Allow them to be points of connection with so many other Jews saying them too, with doubt, with conviction, with fear. And listen for the new songs that have arisen out of them. From the masterful Leonard Cohen, whose words will animate our U’netaneh Tokef tomorrow morning. And the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai of blessed memory, for whom the traditional image of God as Avinu Malkeinu spurred him to ask, “What does a king do in the republic of pain? (Feels) nostalgia for God, and a better world. Our Father, Our King.”

And speaking of the republic of pain! There’s a story of a man who brings some fine material to a tailor and asks him to make a pair of pants. When he comes back a week later, the pants are not ready. Two weeks, three weeks, four… still no pants. Finally, six weeks later, the pants are ready, and it turns out they really are beautiful; they fit perfectly. But as he pays, he can’t resist telling the tailor, “Look… you know, it took God only six days to make the world. It took you six weeks to make this one pair of pants!” “Sure,” the tailor says. “But look at these pants; now, look at the world!”

Look at the world indeed. We listen tonight for what cries out in our broken, fallen world… the only one we know. This Kol Nidre we feel the aftershocks still of the summer’s war between Israel and Gaza. We remember signs and shouted slogans displaying virulent anti-Semitism; caricatures and stereotypes we may have thought we would not see or hear again. We listen in disbelief as more and more ground is lost in the world of public opinion and wonder how we will continue aspiring to be the people we want to be: clear-eyed and strong, never paranoid, on the right side of history, standing up to bigotry, responding to real threats and discerning invented ones, open and knowledgeable enough heed our heads and our hearts, pride and compassion intact. It’s no wonder we listen to Kol Nidre three times through. This is all going to take a very long time. We pray that that’s exactly what we have.

And still, tonight crowds of Israelis stood outside synagogues from Jerusalem to Eilat to listen to Kol Nidre. A few stood inside too.

And still, Seeds of Peace continues their work of bringing teens from areas of global conflict, including the Middle East, together — to teach them dialogue and peacemaking skills. And The Parents’ Circle, made up of Israelis and Palestinians who have all lost immediate family members in the conflict, continues to pursue reconciliation and hope. They struggle to look into the face of the enemy and see a fellow parent, sister or brother, daughter or son. And they do not give up. Listening to their voices reminds us that if they of all people can retain their humanity, then we know we too can try.

And we return always, to listen for what cries out in our own hearts and souls.

For many years, I have read these words in our siddur Mishkan Tefillah: “May the door of this synagogue be wide enough to receive all who hunger for love, all who are lonely for friendship.” Only recently though, do I feel I’m truly hearing them. Do you know that at least three or four of comments in the box just outside are about wanting help starting a chavurah?” No wonder. Chavurah, a word whose root means friendship. The very first flagship chavurot of the 1960’s and 70’s, whose founders listened to the Judaism of their youth and felt notes missing, have grown to include countless groups in Jewish communities and synagogues of all sizes and sensibilities. What they have in common is that they offer meaning and connectivity to individuals and families who might otherwise feel lost in the shuffle. The most successful chavurot, and I include ours at B’nai Tikvah here, are the ones that have evolved over time, growing according to the needs of the group, not according to one single blueprint. In the coming year, we look forward to the conversations and connections that will pave the way towards new chavurot. All who are hunger for love, all who are lonely for friendship … we, your rabbi and cantor, your Temple leadership are ready to listen, and to help.

On this, the holiest night of our year, let us listen as well and as deeply as we can. As our new vows, our new beginnings find their voice in us, let us pause to allow for a meaningful shift.

Let us listen for each other’s presence and support, so that our joys may be amplified… and so that like the man in that nursing home, gone a long time now, who could have been forgotten and wasn’t, none of us need cry out alone.

Listen. What will you hear?

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Where have you traveled from tonight?

A few streets over? The next town perhaps? Across bridges… through tunnels? Where are you traveling from to begin again?

That’s what we mean when we speak of teshuvah — the process that takes hold with us and in us — on Erev Rosh Hashanah. Teshuvah is likened to repentance, and it is that. It’s what we do with the reflection, with the accounting of our actions that the High Holidays bring us to year after year.

But teshuvah is something else as well: a turning. Just as surely as the season turns around us, so we turn as well. Teshuvah calls us back to our most essential selves. And it calls us forward too, towards a voyage yet untested — a year yet unlived. Like no other time of year, we are beckoned out of our places of comfort, and called upon to change. Poet Marge Piercy calls the New Year “a great door that stands across the evening.” (Marge Piercy, “Coming Up On September.”) Here we are.

How do we open the door, and begin to move through?

II

In December of 2013, long before I actually arrived, my journey here began. For some of us whose way of moving through the world involves hitting the ground running, journeys begin with great leaps forward. Others of us, in the words of writer and humorist David Sedaris, prefer to precede every action with ten years of discussion. (David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, p. 232.) I imagine most of us locate ourselves at different points along this spectrum… depending of course on where we are, and where we are going.

This particular journey of mine began with words. A single page, with a description of a synagogue a long way away:

“Our building sits in the hills of Walnut Creek, California, and was designed to take advantage of the beautiful setting the area affords us, from a sanctuary with windows that allow sunlight to stream through during the morning services, to a social hall with floor-to-ceiling windows that allow for a panoramic view of the lush hills around us. We even have a unique outside amphitheater where our Sunday school often meets for their T’filah. It is a very warm and inviting temple that really embraces the congregants and visitors alike from the moment they enter the parking lot.”

Now, is it that I read these words as the snow fell quietly and peacefully outside… in the midst of what would turn out to be the first or second of approximately one hundred snowstorms?

No. It was something more. The Talmud teaches us that words from the heart go to the heart. Reading these words, I could imagine those hills, that amphitheater. They entered my heart.

Still… would these be the words to help me navigate through the winding paths of the unknown? Across the mountains that keep us from really seeing and navigating those first steps, and beginning anew? More practically, how would Michael and I explain to our New England and Wisconsin families that my resume was on its way to California?

My journey had begun. These are some of the words, and the questions that have helped me chart it. I share them with you tonight.

III

January 2014. First visit to Congregation B’nai Tikvah. Granted any story, any journey has more layers to it than meet the eye. Still… the sunlight, this amphitheater, these hills are just how I pictured them. I had forgotten how vast and dramatic the beauty of California is. “Does it ever get old?” I asked a member of the Search Committee. She thought for a moment and shook her head. “It really doesn’t.” Hearing those words, I feel like anything is possible.

At Shabbat services my second night, I hear Cantor Chabon’s voice for the first time. No further words needed! Now would I make this crossing — to have such a partner on the bimah? A partner in thought, laughter, learning and creativity too, I was to discover. The only sensible and immediate answer was yes… many times over!

But it would be a more complex journey too… for all of us. How would I enter into the story of a congregation that began in the spirit of Theodor Herzl’s words: “Im Tirtzu, Ein Zo Aggadah/ If you will it, it is no dream.” All the way from borrowed prayer books and an initial rabbinic contract signed in a founder’s backyard, to a thriving Jewish community with a vibrant religious school under the gifted leadership of Phil Hankin, several longtime chavurot, a robust band and whimsical, heartfelt traditions all its own.

A congregation where the pintele yid, an enigmatic Yiddish phrase best translated as “the Jewish spark” is recognized, appreciated and nurtured in the hearts of its members.

A congregation whose trademark is many hands on deck, and a passion for seeing not only what is, but also what can be. A new building may have replaced the old one, and indeed, it is pointed out to me at every turn on this initial visit where this doorway used to stop, how low that ceiling used to be. But the inside pieces of the story have remained consistent and true. The treasured American poet Walt Whitman remarked “that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” (Walt Whitman, “Oh Me! Oh Life!”)

What will your contribution be? What will mine be? As your second rabbi in Congregation B’nai Tikvah’s existence, how will we become a part of each other’s stories now?

IV

July, 2014. Week 1. Lest any of us think that all the moments of all our journeys are transcendent, today Judy taught me the codes for my email, voicemail and building alarm. No voicemails yet of course. There are two messages in my inbox … though one is from our internet provider. I find myself wanting to freeze time, even if just for a moment. Never but at the very beginning are there only two messages in a rabbi’s inbox! I make a few calls which go to voicemail, and scramble to remember the number to tell them to call back. Next, I move the paperclips from one side of my new desk to the other. Good first day.

Week 2. It’s heartbreakingly, agonizingly clear that what’s going on in Israel this summer isn’t just going to go away. There, many Israelis call it the matzav… simply put: “the situation.” I know I need to talk about it. I know we need to talk about it, but how? Who will blink back tears of relief and gratitude to hear their rabbi affirm that our hearts are with Israel, that any sovereign nation has the right to defend itself against incessant rocket fire across its borders? I believe this. Who will feel validated in hearing that these same hearts of ours bend and break at the loss of innocent civilian life on all sides? That this is a long, complicated story, and just when many of us feel we have somewhat of a handle on it, things change. Another pundit weighs in, another set of facts – or are they fictions? – enters the picture, and so much is called into question again. I believe this too.

Is it enough this time around to talk about the history that breathes within those stones in Jerusalem? About the singular deliciousness of feta cheese and chocolate rugelach fresh from the open air shuk? About how it feels to hear “Shabbat Shalom” in the grocery store on Friday mornings? About the theater company in Tel Aviv where every performer has some level of hearing or visual impairment, yet through their productions, they become an ensemble with a voice all their own?

I don’t know, but I think I’m about to find out.

In the meantime, we light a candle for peace to start our Shabbat service every Friday night. We allow our presence together to say for us that we will bring more light, more understanding and more wholeness to a world crying out for all of it. For now, this is our verse, and we write it together.

Week 4. My first Bat Mitzvah. Well, technically closer to my 200th, but it’s my first one at B’nai Tikvah, and that makes it new. Emma has chosen to find the parallel between what it means for the Israelites to stand at the border of the Promised Land, and her own experience of standing at a border as her family prepares to move away from Walnut Creek. I tell her I’ll always remember her, just like I’ll always remember Emily, my last Bat Mitzvah at Temple B’rith Kodesh in Rochester.

I love these kids … they are funny and interesting, and the closer their process of celebrating this milestone comes, the more they come into their own. One of them says that if he forgets to stop between his aliyot, I can just kick him. A parent reflects that in the short time since her son’s Bar Mitzvah, she sees the difference in him. I’ve learned that when we talk with our students here about holding the weight of the Torah, we really mean it, literally and figuratively. Those scrolls are heavy! I’m so proud to be stepping into a place where B’nai Mitzvah are filled with kavannah… with intention, and meaning. In these moments, the next generation reflects back to us all the Jewish education, attention and caring that’s been poured into them. They are helping me begin again. I hope someday they know that.

August, 2014. Week 5. Michael and I are heading up the coast for a few days. “Are you sure this is the way?” I ask as we near our destination. “Well, I turned west, and that’s the only way to the ocean,” he replies.

“You turned… which way towards the ocean?”

Oh.

Week 6. Now I’ve heard it… the story to end all stories. This is the one we rabbis have nightmares about all summer. A little over a year ago, Rabbi Asher stood before you to offer his last Rosh Hashanah Eve sermon, just as I stand here now offering my first. He turned from page four to page five I was told, and … where was it? Oh dear God. My hands felt icy just hearing this story, never mind living it.

And he finessed it! There is some mathematical disagreement about the shortest distance between two points, but as far as rabbinic distances go, I can tell you one of the longest has to be the space between two pages, especially on the High Holidays, when one of those pages is missing and the room is filled with a sea of expectant faces.

And he finessed it.

My admiration for this rabbi, already considerable, deepened that day. Rabbi Asher’s mentchlekeit, gentle humor, wealth of Jewish knowledge, and modest soul have been a true beacon since I arrived. His wisdom, his grace and his commitment to B’nai Tikvah are, as we speak, allowing a new rabbi to step into this place, into this congregation for the first time in its history. His way of providing me with guidance and context have been, and will continue to be, my signposts.

Some of the deepest and most fruitful new beginnings are also the most poignant, because we are all, in our own ways, saying goodbye to the year that was … to its joy, its pain, its exultation and its losses. We are acknowledging that change will come… and with our presence here tonight, we affirm that we are as ready as we can be to face whatever will be.

The most comforting piece of wisdom I can offer something I learned from one of my Confirmation students in Rochester, which is also greeting a brand new year with brand new clergy tonight. In reflecting on what he had learned about Judaism during the past year, as part of his personal statement during the class service, he said: “we are a people with large hearts.”

I think he’s right. Our hearts are expansive enough to miss what we had, what we knew … even as we celebrate the new beginnings that lie ahead… within our community and beyond it too.

It’s as though that missing page five is speaking to us in its own way tonight, telling us without ever having to say the words, that we all lose pages from time to time. We get exhausted and sad, and have no idea how to journey forward one more day with what feels like the ocean on the wrong side, longing only for what was. And then we find our pages again. We do. Or we find new ones. And that’s how we will become a part of each other’s stories, and how together, we will write the next chapter. Informed and inspired by our past, proud of our present, and confident in our future.

If Rosh Hashanah truly is the time in our spiritual lives that we open the Book of Life, and what is written there reveals itself, then may that opening and that revelation bring with it a renewed sense of purpose, goodness and blessing.

May we all be so inscribed.

L’Shana Tovah.

Our journey begins.

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