Rosh Hashanah Evening 5770: Dancing at Heaven’s Gate

Rosh Hashanah Morning 5770: Waking to our Real Wealth

Rosh Hashanah Evening 5770: Dancing at Heaven’s Gate
 
 
I am not a dancer.  I love to move to the music in the privacy of my home, but in public settings, dancing makes me fearful.  As a boy, at Jewish summer camp, when the counselors called everyone into a circle for the hora, I would hide, terrified of falling on my face or stepping on someone’s foot.  During my school days, I was the consummate wallflower: insecure in my social skills, physically awkward, and paralyzed by self-consciousness.  As I grew up, I learned to exit inconspicuously when the band began to play, but I never conquered my fear of dancing. I envied those with the daring to waltz and whirl, shimmy and shake their way across a room.  I longed to leap and glide.  But I lacked the courage to make myself vulnerable, to step out onto the floor.   
 
While shying away in corners, I rarely found myself alone.  Over the years, I met so many people, young and old, who shared my desire and trepidation; who, like me, yearn to dance but fail to rise above their fear.
 
And then, this spring, I joined my daughter, Rosa, and seventy of her classmates on a school trip to Spain.  I was a chaperone, but the students proved to be my teachers, for it seemed like wherever we went, they danced:  in the courtyards of the Royal Palace, the ornate halls of the Prado Museum and the manicured gardens of the Alhambra.  They danced for photographs, and they danced when no one was looking.  They danced alone and together, on streets and sidewalks and subways.  Sometimes gracefully, sometimes not—but always fearlessly—they danced and danced.
Six weeks later, I thought of Rosa and her friends as I stood on the rooftop of the world, surrounded by down-clad fellow trekkers in the cold and crystalline early morning light of the Nepalese Himalayas. After twelve days of arduous climbing, at almost eighteen thousand feet, atop Annapurna’s Thorung La Pass, I was filled with an almost desperate desire to dance.  But I was still afraid. 
 
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My friends, as we look back upon the past year, we survey a landscape littered with wreckage.  It was a season marked by far more fear than dancing.  5769 was an extraordinarily trying time for our nation, our city, our community—and for many of you, the families and individuals who gather here on this sacred eve.  Who knew, a year ago, that this Rosh Hashanah would find us mired in the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression?  Over the past twelve months, many among us have been laid off.  More have lost their job security.  And more still watched helplessly as the money they patiently saved for college or retirement evaporated almost overnight.  On top of all of these losses, there were the myriad personal sorrows that touched so many members of our community.  Some were struck by illness, at times chronic or catastrophic.  Others struggled with unraveling relationships, failing marriages, and the sadness that engulfs us when love dies.  And there have been, as always, too many funerals. To be in the presence of this Jewish community on the cusp of 5770 is to bear witness to the sorrow and pain that many bear.  The wounds are still fresh, the hurt unabated. On this Yom HaDin, this Day of Judgment, we feel our vulnerability. The black grip of fear tightens its hold.  Our illusions of abundance and security are stripped away.  Many of us enter this new year fragile, exposed, and afraid.
Just to acknowledge this, together in community, is an important beginning, for we cannot move forward until we recognize our frailty.  As Jews, we are no strangers to this truth.  Our history and our Torah both teach that life is as precarious as it is valuable.   Goodness is no guarantee of divine protection and crisis is not the exception but the rule.   Our mystics have long preached that the world is broken, the Divine presence lies in exile, and our shared calling to heal this cosmic state of disrepair is fraught with peril. 
 
So how do we cope with our anxiety?  How do we live well, fully cognizant of life’s fragility? 
 
More often than not, we fail. 
 
Sometimes we respond to our fear with denial, by steeling ourselves against suffering.  Instead of acknowledging our vulnerability, we shut ourselves off.  To protect ourselves from the sting of sorrow, we harden our hearts.   Occasionally, we head down this path consciously.  More often, we awaken one day to find ourselves there, having strayed in tiny increments over years or decades.  Without even realizing it, we choose the safety of emotional disengagement over the dread of heartbreak. 


This is understandable.  It is, indeed, a terrifying choice to live alert and fully engaged in this broken world.  But what a steep price we pay to maintain the illusion of security and control! If we anesthetize ourselves enough, in order to deny our fear, we turn our souls to stone.
 
Jewish tradition warns against this danger with the tragic story of Pharaoh.  As a boy, like everyone else, Pharaoh undoubtedly harbored an abundance of hopes and fears.  But when he ascends to the throne, he becomes a kind of deity, utterly removed from such ordinary emotions as anxiety and disappointment.  And so Pharaoh loses his humanity.  As the brilliant contemporary commentator Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg notes:
 
Pharaoh constructs himself as a god. . . as heavy, dense, and impregnable as possible.. Thus he becomes a prototype of arrogance.  But the point that strikes us most forcefully is the fear of vulnerability that lies at the heart of such arrogance.
 
Zornberg cuts to the quick here.  She recognizes that what appears on the surface as arrogance is, in fact, insecurity.  Pharaoh’s impermeable demeanor is a symptom of his underlying terror.  Pharaoh is no fallen god.  He is, instead, something much sadder: a frightened, lonely man whose trepidation comes to destroy himself—and his entire nation.
 
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When we deny our fragility and fear, we become latter-day Pharaohs, petrified men and women. And statues cannot dance.  On the other hand, if we surrender to our anxiety and let it rule over us, we suffer the fate of dor ha-midbar, the generation of Israelites that left Pharaoh’s Egypt, only to die in the wilderness, because they were too afraid to enter the Promised Land.  No matter how swiftly we flee from our fear, we cannot outrun it.  And when we cower, we only empower our demons and demolish ourselves.
 
In his book The Snow Leopard, writer Peter Matthiesen describes a perilous crossing on a narrow trail high in the Himalayaas.  I pondered his words many times on my own trek.  He writes, “I cling to the cliff edge, as to life itself.  And of course it is this clinging, the tightness of panic, that gets people killed: to clutch, in ancient Egyptian, to clutch the mountain in Assyrian, were euphemisms that signified, to die.”
 
We all encounter treacherous passages—over the vales of death and disease, failure and loss where, paralyzed by fright, we clutch the metaphorical mountain and thereby heighten our fears.  There are so many ways to surrender to panic, to let our anxiety rule over us.  Some of us cling to drugs or food or alcohol to distract ourselves from what we dread.  Others remain stuck in unhealthy places and relationships because our fear of doing something different overwhelms our desire for transformation.  Knowing that all meaningful journeys pose significant risks, we may never leave our homes.   Or we may wile away our days trying to circumvent hazards, seeking roundabout paths to safety when, in the end, the only successful route is straight through the danger.  Fear and indirection cripple us.  We wander in the desert when we should be looking toward the Promised Land.


An old folktale teaches:
 Once upon a time there was a village where all the people were content.  Everyone worked and played together; even the dogs and cats were the best of friends.
 
One day, an enormous giant appeared, heading toward the town.  With every step he took, the earth shook.  Upon entering the gates, he quietly sat down in the village green.  Seized by terror, the villagers ran into their houses and refused to come out.  And so it went, for days on end: the giant did not budge, and the people, frightened for their very lives, barricaded themselves in their homes.
 
And then, on a fine spring afternoon, one young girl grew tired of hiding indoors.  Longing for the light of day, eager to play in the sunshine, she ran out her back door.  When they realized what had happened, her horrified parents cried out, "STOP! COME BACK! There’s a giant!" But it was too late.  The girl didn't stop; just the opposite—she began to walk straight toward the giant.
 
And then the strangest thing happened.  The closer the girl came to the giant, the smaller he became.  With one step, he was the size of an oak tree, with the next, a small house.  Soon he was the same size as the girl.  And as the girl stepped beside him, she now towered over him, for he had shrunken to the size of rabbit.  The villagers watched with amazement as she bent down, gently lifted him in her hands, and asked, “Who are you? What is your name?”
 
The former giant replied in a whisper, “Some consider me a strange creature, but you know me well.  When I meet people, they become frightened—and when people are afraid of me, I grow into a giant.  But you were not afraid, so I became small.  My name?  Well, I have several.  Some call me pestilence, others, famine.  Many call me ‘fear’ or ‘what-might-happen.’  And the saddest people of all call me by their own name.”
 
We are so often like those villagers, diminished by our fears.  Jewish tradition knows this well, for the commandment that occurs most frequently in the Hebrew Bible—well over one hundred times in all—is the two word phrase, al tirah, “Don’t be afraid.” But this is much easier said than done.  Fear is not banished by divine decree.  King David offers us more genuine comfort when, in the psalms, he turns to God in frightening times and declares, “Atah eemadi—You are with me.”  This is the measure of David’s greatness: in the face of adversity, he neither cowers nor denies his fear.  Instead, he takes down his harp and, as it were, asks God to dance with him. 
 
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When our vulnerability is laid bare, when anxiety makes us tremble, it is so easy to either harden our hearts or to beat a hasty retreat.  In the first case, we overcompensate for our fears; in the second, we let them to rule over us.   Either way, we lose.  So if it is futile to vanquish our fear, and tragic to surrender to it—what should we do?
 
I suggest that, like King David, we learn to dance.  We can begin by acknowledging our fear, for in speaking directly to it, we diminish its hold on us.   Then, summoning our courage, we invite it to the dance, for each of us is capable of astonishing grace and beauty when we choreograph our fear into our footwork.
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In her short story, Dance in America, Lorrie Moore takes us into the world of an aging ballet dancer, now working as an artist in the schools.  She recalls speaking to a class:
I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it's the body's reaching, bringing the air to itself. I tell them it's the heart's triumph, the victory speech of the feet...It's life giving death the bird.
 


 
 
In times of personal and communal crisis, God asks us to join in just this kind of life-affirming dance, to hold Her as we waltz with—and through—our fear.  The Holy One invites us to be Her partner.   “OK,” She says, “you live in challenging times.  Your panic is reasonable and real.  Life is not fair.  I do not always punish the wicked or reward the just.  I cannot promise you freedom from pain and suffering; just the opposite—no one leaves this world unscathed.  And yet,” She calls to each of us, “I hope that you will dance with Me.” 
We are all so frail.  Any day, we might lose our jobs or our savings, our health, or God forbid, our lives.  The cliché that the Holy One does not give anyone more than they can handle is a cruel lie.  God did not—perhaps could not—create a world without the terrible sting of loss.  But She can and does promise that we may learn to move with grace even when our hearts break.  Not right away, of course: first we argue and bargain and weep and wail and grieve and mourn.  But through all of this, She lovingly invites us to the dance, waiting patiently until we muster the courage to say Yes, and open our arms to Her, and take that first hard and halting step. 
 
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We need not look far for inspiration.  Role models are all around us.  Boise-born Reverend Forrest Church knows a great deal about life giving death the bird, about how to dance with fear.  Diagnosed with terminal cancer, he has continued to preach and teach in his Manhattan Unitarian Church.  Standing before his congregation May 31 he declared:
When we are paralyzed by fear, we are self-absorbed.  There is no room for the present, only for our shopping list of fears and grievances, wants and inadequacies.
 
And so Reverend Church—this dying and yet so profoundly alive—pastor concluded:
 
Want what you have. Do what you can. Be who you are. This is the day we are given.  Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
 
 
 
The poet, WH Auden, offers the same simple wisdom: Dance when you can.
 
 
And so many of our Jewish forefathers and mothers and prophets and sages teach us, too.
Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel and Leah, Moses and Miriam all feared for themselves and their descendents.  All faced a future fraught with peril.  They argued with God, endured terrible trials, wrestled with beings human and divine. 
 
Akiba proclaimed the words of the Shema with his dying breath, as the Romans burned him at the stake.
 
Queen Esther mustered the courage to address the king on behalf of her people, in their time of greatest trial.
 
Rabbi Kalonymous ben Shapira preached hope and faith to his congregation from his shul in the inferno of the Warsaw Ghetto —though he knew full well that he—and they—were doomed.
 
And there have been so many more, so many teachers, most with names long forgotten, who have lived with grace amidst the worst of circumstances.
 
None of these men or women were superhuman.  Each knew very well what it was to feel afraid.  But they are our heroes because when others cowered or denied their fear, these leaders learned to dance with it.
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Robert Fulghum offers a true story from the island of Crete.  He recalls:
 
The dancing began after a village wedding. . . The fancy footwork confused me.  “Don’t make a fool of yourself,” I thought.  “Just watch.” 
 
Reading my mind, an older woman dropped out of the dance, sat down beside me, and said, “If you join the dancing, you will feel foolish.  If you do not, you will also feel foolish.  So, why not dance?”
 
And, she said she had a secret for me.  She whispered, “If you do not dance, we will know you are a fool.  But if you dance, we will think well of you for trying.”
 
When we dance through struggle and sorrow, when we dance despite—and with—our  fear, surely God thinks well of us for trying,  and helps us move toward healing.
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These are hard times.  In Hebrew, we call this season the Days of Awe.  The word for awe, nora, comes from the same root as fear.  It is no surprise, then, that awe and fear infuse the liturgy for these holy days: “Chaneynu v’aneynu, ki ayn banu ma’asim—Have  mercy on us, for our deeds amount to nothing. . .”; “Mi yamut u-mi y’chiyeh—Who shall live and who shall die. . .”
 
Yet these sacred festivals are ultimately more about joy than dread—not the hedonistic pleasure of the secular New Year’s Eve, but the blessing that comes when we dance with our fear.  Rosh Hashanah offers the hope of new beginnings.  And while we tend to think of Yom Kippur as a somber day of affliction, it was not always so.  Consider the teaching of the Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:8), from nearly two thousand years ago:
Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel says, "There were no happier days for the Jews than Yom Kippur, for the women of Jerusalem would go out in white clothing. . . to dance in the vineyards. 
 
As we prepare for Yom Kippur, just nine days from now, let us ask ourselves: how can we bring a little more dance into our fasting and our prayers for forgiveness?
 
Standing on the rooftop of the world, as early morning sunlight poured over the snowy Thorung La, I was torn between my desire to dance and my all-too-familiar fear.  The fear almost won.  And then I imagined my forebears who had endured circumstances incomparably more frightening than my own, who had suffered indescribably, and still danced with their fears even as they walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.   I, by contrast, deeply blessed on this magnificent mountain morning, stood at heaven’s gate.  Looking around, I knew I had walked too far and climbed too high to let fear win this round.  And so, I danced.  I wasn’t graceful and it didn’t last long; at eighteen thousand feet, I was winded after just a few heavy steps.  But that did not matter.  As I waltzed through the thin air, my fear fell away.  For in that moment, that sweet and beautiful moment, there was nothing but the dance.
 
And so, I pray, in this sacred season, may it be for each of us.  Entering this new year fully conscious of our frailty and fear, may we raise our eyes, together, to the mountains, toward the Source of our Help, who waits for us—and, stepping into Her open arms, may we  dance and dance and dance.
 
Ken y’hi ratzon 

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Rosh Hashanah Morning 5770: Waking to our Real Wealth

  
Introduction: A Rosh Hashanah Riddle
A riddle for Rosh Hashanah: What do the sound of the shofar and the economic crisis have in common?  Each is jarring, even if you saw it coming.  Both may be prolonged by an abundance of hot air.  And most importantly, each can be a wakeup call.
 
Maimonides considers the shofar a kind of spiritual alarm clock.  Noting that its sound is harsh rather than pretty, a wail that comes from the guts, he describes the shofar’s message this way: “Awake all of you sleepers from your slumber! Remember your Creator !”  Tekiah-shevarim-teruah—these calls are designed to revive rather than soothe us.  Over the course of the year our senses are dulled by routine.  Mundane pursuits cause us to forget our Divine purpose.  The shofar urges us to return to the Holy One, to remember and give thanks for all that is sacred in our lives.
 
Crisis does this, too.  Once we are able to dance with our fear, we can begin to learn from our tribulations.  After we feel secure enough to acknowledge our vulnerability, we do well to consider our woes and ask: what might this teach our nation, our communities, our families and ourselves? Into what new—and higher—reality might this difficult alarm come to waken us?
 
A Caveat: Crises are Not Gifts from God
First, an important caveat: In asking this question, I do not in any way wish to suggest that God burdens us with troubles in order to teach us life lessons, or that everything turns out for the best.  I do not want, God forbid, to suggest to anyone who has endured a difficult illness or mourned the death of a dear one, who has lost a job, or seen their financial security crumble, that this happened to instruct or improve you.  I completely reject the notion that God micro-manages life on earth, or that everything happens for a reason.  To the contrary: I believe much that matters dearly is governed by chance, and many events happen randomly, without any sense or purpose other  than that which we may choose to invest them with after the fact.  But once crisis comes, wherever it comes from, it behooves us to cry, to grieve, to express anger or pain, and then, after the passage of due time, when we begin to recover from the initial shock, to reflect on who we are and how we live—because the only real alternative to finding some kind of meaning in the aftermath of crisis is to fall apart. 
 
Mission and Money: Living Our Values
So what can we learn from the recent economic meltdown? 
Many poets and teachers have noted that for all the beauty of spring and summer, we see farthest in the winter, when the trees are bare.  So it is in the fiscal lives of households and institutions: difficult times force us to scrutinize how we spend our money, which is the best test of where our real priorities lie.  Warren Buffet recently expressed this in his own inimical fashion, noting: “You don’t know who is swimming naked until the tide goes out.”  In periods of abundance, it is relatively easy to live without examining our core values.  When adversity strikes, this is much more difficult.  That is why hardship is like the harsh call of the shofar: it can re-awaken us to what matters most, in our individual lives and in the life of the community.
 
After years of consulting with congregations, my friend and colleague, Rabbi David Fine came to a realization: if you want to know the true culture of a synagogue, you don’t focus on its mission statement—you read its budget.  That is where values are translated into action.   A community may call itself Temple Torah and tout Jewish learning as its chief concern, but if it spends one hundred dollars on adult education and one hundred thousand on its annual brunch and fashion show, then it might as well be named B’nai Bagel.  In periods of prosperity, communities can fund a wide array of programs and thereby postpone the hard financial decisions that define their priorities.  But hard times force us to make the tough choices that show the world—and ourselves—what we truly value, which is to say, who we really are.  This can be a fiscal—and moral—wake up call.  When we hear the strident tones of the shofar in this season of scarcity, we do well to ask ourselves: do our budgets reflect our mission?   Are we spending our now-precious resources on what should be our primary concerns?
 
Here it is instructive to note the crucial difference between congregations and corporations.  For a business, the goal—the final end—is to make money.   This is not to ignore the many good things companies do to support their communities: providing volunteers, financial aid, and leadership skills.  But the central mission of any business remains, by default, to generate income.  That’s what makes it a business.
 
For synagogues, by contrast, the mission is not to make money; it is to be a sacred community, dedicated to healing the world through Torah, spiritual service, and acts of lovingkindness.  Yes, these things cost money.  Congregations must fund programs, cover their expenses, and pay their staff, their mortgage and their utility bills—and none of these come cheap.   But for us, money—and what it buys—are means,  not ends.  We forget this at our peril, for to confuse means and ends—to focus on money as our mission rather than as an instrument toward achieving that mission—is to lose our very reason for existence.  If we are to continue to thrive here at Ahavath Beth Israel, it is essential to keep this truth front and center.  Indeed, focusing too intensely on fiscal matters does not even help generate more money; it is actually counterproductive.  We will never be as good at business as any successful company.  To compete on their terms is to doom ourselves.  People don’t go to shul for corporate expertise.  All of you know that you can get that better in other places.  You come to Ahavath Beth Israel for spiritual sustenance.   Our task is to provide it, and obsessing about money hinders us from fulfilling that task, from being the best at what we do and who we are.  Our calling is to offer significant opportunities for Jewish growth, to be a place where God is present, to nurture and support one another.  We must have faith that if we do these things well, our members will provide for our material needs.   If we do not spend our resources on our primary Jewish obligations, we will be sure to lose both our money and our sense of purpose.  We cannot afford to diminish our support for Jewish education and tikkkun olam, for  they provide the sustenance that keeps us coming to shul during these difficult times.


Who is Rich? Those Who Rejoice in their Portion
 
We need the synagogue to remind us that money is not the measure of happiness or success.  This is a profoundly counter-cultural message in modern America, but our tradition has known it from the start.  Two thousand years ago, Rabbi ben Zoma asked: “Ayzeh hu ashir— Who is rich?” and answered: “Ha-sameach b’chelko—those who rejoice in what they have.”  Ben Zoma does not romanticize poverty, nor does he suggest that we are free to ignore the plight of the un- and under-employed.  Our tradition views economic hardship as an evil, and commands us to fight poverty, locally and globally.  Still, ben Zoma recognizes a truth confirmed by many recent studies, which is that there is little relationship between wealth and happiness.  There is a correlation toward the  lower end of the socio-economic ladder, for a basic level of material comfort is essential for maintaining both physical and spiritual life.  We need base-line economic security: a living wage, sufficient food and shelter, and decent healthcare.  But once one reaches that threshold, more money does not equal more happiness, for either individuals or institutions.  As Rabbi Bradley Artson notes, contentment is a largely a choice, a matter of attitude more than circumstance.  If you pine for what you do not have, you are impoverished, even if you are a billionaire.  Once our core needs are met, we are far better off putting our time and energy toward rejoicing in our portion than striving to earn a fortune.  Sometimes it takes hardship to remind us of this truth.
 
In his essay, “To Save a Soul,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel follows in the footsteps of ben Zoma and inquires:  “What is the meaning of nobility?”   He responds with a parable from Jewish history:
A person possessing nobility is one whose hidden wealth surpasses his outward wealth. . . 
If a Greek poet had arrived at Samaria, the capital of the Kingdom of Israel, he would have been surprised and overcome with emotion; he would have praised and lauded in verse the idols, the beautiful temples and palaces which the kings of Israel and their ministers had built.  But the prophet Amos, after visiting Samaria, did not sing, nor did he bow to the glory of the ivory buildings.  When he looked at the buildings of carved stone, at the ivory temples and the beautiful orchards, he saw in them the oppression of the poor, robbery and plunder.  External magnificence neither entranced him nor led him astray.  His whole being cried out in the name of the Lord, “I loath the pride of Jacob, and I detest his palaces.
 
Judaism teaches that beauty which is acquired at the cost of justice is an abomination and should be rejected for its loathsomeness.  The criterion by which we judge beauty is integrity. . .
 
Thankfully, even the worst economic crisis cannot take away our nobility, the integrity that comprises our inner wealth.  Just the opposite: difficult times can waken us to the vitality of our hidden riches, the bounty that sustains us when money is hard to come by.


 
Bliss, Blessing, and Bhutan
 
Reporter Eric Wiener asks yet another related question: “Where are the world’s happiest places?”
This query leads him on a fascinating journey, recounted in his book, The Geography of Bliss.  Wiener travels the globe in pursuit of happiness and finds it in unexpected ways and places.  Like ben Zoma, he discovers that once a basic standard of living is reached, happiness is not attained through increased wealth.  This is particularly evident in a
deeply impoverished but profoundly happy Himalayan kingdom.  Wiener writes:
This is the thing about Bhutan.  They do things that don’t make economic sense.  Like forsaking millions of dollars in tourist revenue or refusing to sell valuable timber product.  The Bhutanese, poor as they are, do not bow to the gods of efficiency and productivity.  They recognize that measurements like Gross Domestic Product don’t register the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate.  GDP counts everything except that which makes life worthwhile.  As the renegade economist EF Schumacher put it, “There are poor countries that have too little.  But where is the rich society that says, “Halt!  We have enough!”
 
Perhaps our current economic crisis will help teach us in the developed West to say: We have enough.  Here, our tradition can offer guidance.  Each year at our seders, as we celebrate our spiritual freedom, we sing this mantra with great exuberance: Dayyenu!  We have enough!  And one of our central names for God is El Shaddai, which the Rabbis read as an abbreviated form of El sh’amar Di—the Holy One who said, “Enough!”  This ancient Divine Name, known to our patriarchs and matriarchs, offers a crucial lesson in our own time.  It reminds us that there is strength in limits, in learning to live with less, to say “Enough” to material things so that we can focus our spiritual resources on what is meaningful rather than on what is profitable.
 
Here at Ahavath Beth Israel, we can draw comfort from this lesson, for we are abundantly blessed.  Like the Bhutanese, we do not lack what we most need.  We are not an affluent Jewish community but when it comes to spiritual wealth, we have a fortune.  We have Torah to teach, God to serve, and people to support.  Our most precious communal capital lies in the Chicken Soup group, in the work we do with the homeless at Sanctuary, in Feast of Torah and the Friendship Feast, in the countless volunteers who sit on committees and visit the sick and come to services and serve and clean up at onegs and teach in our school and do all the other innumerable tasks that keep our synagogue warm and welcoming.  When money is scarce, these things become, if anything, even more precious.  Who is rich?   When it comes to what matters most, we are—when we live up to our calling as a congregation and community.
 
God is in this Place
 
We Jews define our selves as bayt ya’akov and b’nai Yisrael, the children of our forefather, Jacob.  Over the course of his long life, he accumulated great material wealth—but that is not where he experienced God.  Jacob encountered the Holy One in night visions, in dark and difficult times: wrestling with an angel on the banks of the Yabbok River, going down into Egypt amidst famine—and fleeing his birthplace with little more than the shirt on his back.  He is, quite literally, a homeless wanderer when he lies down on the desert ground to sleep, with a stone for a pillow.  It is there, alone beneath the starry sky, that he dreams of a ladder linking heaven and earth—and, come dawn, wakens to his real wealth, proclaiming, “Surely God was in this place, and I did not know it.”
 
My friends, in just a few moments, we will hear the shofar.  May the harsh beauty of its call rouse us, like Jacob, to the presence of the Divine, in the midst of adversity.  May it turn us to one another, and to the best that is in us, in our families, in our congregation and community.   Then, truly blessed, we might just find this New Year to be the season when, waking to our real wealth, we stepped out from the darkness and, looking eastward toward the dawn, proclaimed anew our forefather’s ancient words of hope: “Surely God was always in this place, even when we did not know it.”
 
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