HHD Sermons

While passing by a newsstand in the Salt Lake City airport recently, a book caught my eye. Nestled on a shelf of glittery best-sellers, this one stood out in its stark austerity. The title could not have been more direct: Truth—Seeing Black and White in a Grey World.

My interest piqued, I picked it up and began to read the preface. The author got straight to the point:

It’s a simple choice—or is it? Truth is intended to help you put an end to ambiguity and allow you to see the truth concerning many of the controversial issues in our society as defined by the light of God’s word. No excuses, no mental gymnastics, no situation ethics—just the truth, plain and simple. Isn’t it time to find out what God has to say about the questions that are going unanswered in your heart?

“Isn’t it time. . .?” I heard my flight number announced over the intercom, so I returned the book to the shelf, bought myself a granola bar, strolled to the gate and boarded for Boise. But that slim volume, with its ambitious promise of absolute clarity, remained in my thoughts for the entire trip home and beyond, through the busy weeks of preparation for these Days of Awe.

Unambiguous truth. Simple choices. Right and wrong, good and bad—all brilliantly illuminated by the light of God’s word. That’s a lot to pack into 100 pages. Yet part of me—and maybe a part of all of us—longs for the world that it portrays, a moral universe in which the truth is ascertainable in less time it takes to get through the airport security line. Everyone gets what they deserve, in accordance with the merit of their deeds. The righteous are rewarded, the wicked are punished. It’s so clean, so enviably tidy: no ambiguity, no paradox, no complexity—just straightforward, unequivocal answers to all of the heart’s questions.

This worldview appeals to us because the alternative—the universe we actually inhabit—is pretty much the opposite of all of these things. It is complicated, paradoxical, filled with grey, ambiguous and inexplicable. As Jane Hirschfield notes in her stunning essay, “Poetry and Uncertainty”:

One of the penalties of consciousness is waking each day into the awareness that the future cannot be predicted, that the universe rests on the back of an incomprehensible mystery, that bewilderment, caprice, and the unknowable are among the most faithful companions of any life.

This is not a recipe for reassurance. If, above all, we seek comfort and clarity, then the airport book promises what the poet cannot. But comfort and clarity are not our calling. As we gather here to mark another Rosh Hashanah, together with our people everywhere, let us affirm it is the poet’s vision that we need. On this sacred eve, poised at the threshold of a new year, we face enormous uncertainty as individuals, as Americans, as Jews, and as citizens of the world. On this first night of 5769, anticipating uncertain and even difficult days ahead, our tradition calls us to reject the false assurance of easy answers. This is not the Jewish way, not the path of a people whose name, Israel, means God-wrestlers. The security proffered by this fundamentalist worldview is purchased at far too dear a cost, for it belies reality, polarizes communities, shuts off conversation and, in the end, leaves us lost and lonely.

In short, my friends, I propose that in the coming new year, we strive to live by the prayerful words of the poet Mary Oliver:

So how do we navigate this difficult journey? Why should we be wary of simple, unequivocal answers? How do we learn to live with ambiguity? And what rewards might such a path, anchored in uncertainty, offer to those who with the courage to take it?

Perhaps the most obvious reason to resist the allure of certainty is because, for all of its power, it is so clearly illusory. Both science and experience tell us that uncertainty is built into the fabric of existence. Doubt and ambiguity cannot be reasonably explained away. Worldviews offering simple Truth with a capital “T” do not jibe with reality.

But the pursuit of certainty is not just futile; it is also dangerous. Moral certitude is deeply divisive. An unquestioning sense of our own rightness inevitably leads us to view those with whom we disagree as not just different but, by definition, wrong. We may talk at them, trying to convince them of our truth. But we won’t take the time to listen to them, because in a black and white universe, the Other is always the enemy. Claiming certainty, we shut off dialogue. Ambiguity creates conversation, certitude slams doors. Human relationships cannot thrive without a healthy dose of doubt—to restrain our hubris, feed our curiosity, and open our hearts. There is a bitter irony at play here: the illusion of unambiguous truth, which we chase in search of comfort, leaves us distrustful, despairing and alone.

And the perils of certainty which wreak such havoc in the lives of individuals are no less damaging in the affairs of countries and communities. Just consider the arc of our nation over the last eight years: Arrogant in their conviction that America embodies God’s truth, our leaders have bound our nation on the altar of their self-righteous certainty. They have lorded their rightness over others to devastating effect, when we might have listened and learned. So here we are: a great nation reduced to a virtual pariah state, abandoned by most of our allies, lost and lonely at home and abroad.

Thus the overriding questions in this urgent hour: How do we make teshuvah, how do we turn—away from the arrogance of certainty, towards openness and ambiguity? How do we learn to live with, or better yet, embrace a life with more questions than answers—as individuals, in community, and as a nation?

We might begin by acknowledging our fear, for it is fear, above all else, that fuels our pursuit of certainty. This is understandable enough, for ambiguity is, indeed, deeply disquieting. Who among us would not prefer to travel with a fool-proof map? Living with uncertainty, with the knowledge that no such map exists, can be terrifying. A world riddled with randomness generates an enormous amount of anxiety.

But here is the paradox: when we deny our doubts, when run from ambiguity and cling to illusions of clarity, we only empower the anxiety we vainly wish to flee. Fear feeds on denial. So when we admit that mystery frightens us, when we face our fears and speak directly of and to them, we loosen their grip on us. The only way past our fear of the unknown is to own it, to make ourselves vulnerable, to offer our hearts to it rather than shunting it away. This is the significance of Rabbi Nachman’s famous teaching: Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tza’ar m’od-All the world is a very narrow bridge—and the main thing is to cross that bridge by confronting, and even embracing our fear, by meeting its gaze head on—and thereby denying its hold on us. The very act of acknowledging the fear creates its opposite, which is faith. To live with ambiguity is to practice a kind of faith that confounds certainty, opens conversation and binds us to one another. Persistent, resilient hope is the antidote to fear’s paralysis. When we claim this hope, this faith, we find that we are not alone. Courage is contagious. Hope heals multitudes. Faith creates community. It is easier to face our fears when we stand with others who are willing to do the same. We all gain in strength and compassion when we are linked in vulnerability with others on this fragile planet. Sharing our uncertainty with fellow travelers provides the comfort we seek but cannot ever really find in being right.

Even in community, this is easier said than done. It is terribly hard to face our fears, to praise uncertainty, to walk that narrow bridge. Jane Hirschfield eloquently describes the challenge of finding a home in ambiguity: “To exchange certainty for praise of mystery and doubt is to step back from the hubris and live in the receptive, both vulnerable and exposed. . . It can be thought of as standing out in the rain so long that, soaked through, one grows once again warm; or if not warm, drenched to the point there is no reason left to seek shelter.” This is a tough and time-consuming practice, a journey that lasts a lifetime.

But for all its arduousness, this path is deeply familiar to the Jewish people, for it has been our way since the days of our father, Abraham. One might think that the closer we are to God, the more clarity we enjoy; this is the premise of the airport book and the touchstone of fundamentalist faith. Yet the narrative of Avraham Avinu teaches just the opposite; its counter-intuitive lesson is that those who are closest to God live with the most uncertainty of all. The more ambiguity we embrace, the more we experience Ayn Sof, the Unknowable One whose presence fills creation.

Abraham’s story begins with Lech l’chah—Go forth!—God’s call to uproot himself from everything familiar, to leave his family, friends, homeland—and set out, without a map, towards an unknown destination. Our Rabbis teach that over the course of Abraham’s journeys, God tested with him with ten trials. The last and most terrible of these also begins with Lech l’chah. We will read it tomorrow: Lech l’chah el eretz ha-moriah, v’ha’alayhu sham l’olah al echad he-harim asher omar aylechah—Go forth to the land of Moriah, and sacrifice your son as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” In his commentary on this trial, Rashi captures the terrifying uncertainty that frames the life of Abraham. He suggests that Isaac was spared at literally the last possible instant. Indeed, Rashi notes, it was as if Isaac’s ashes were laid upon the altar—kee m’at sh’lo nishchat—he was all but slaughtered. Commenting on Rashi’s interpretation, the great contemporary scholar Avivah Zornberg suggests that this phrase—kee m’at sh’lo nishchat—expresses the essence of Abraham’s experience, a story of radical contingency, in which only a hair’s breath separates life from death and determines the fate of a nation. Abraham’s knowledge of God brings him a life of absolute uncertainty. And Abraham’s greatness is that he navigates this landscape of doubt and unpredictability with courage and compassion. Thus he remains our role model, a teacher who faced his fear and walked the narrow bridge with unsurpassable grace. Our challenge is to follow in his very large footsteps.

With that said, I am reminded of a teaching of Rabbi Israel Salanter, the great Lithuanian sage who once confessed, “With every sermon I give, I am preaching aloud to myself.” Of this, I plead guilty this evening. Tonight, I am preaching aloud to myself, for I have struggled mightily with uncertainty over the course of my own life. Time and time again, I have retreated from ambiguity and sought solace in the illusion of certitude. More often than not, I have cowered in the face of my fears. I have been judgmental when I should have listened compassionately, offered answers and decrees when I should have been content with questions. I have run from my doubts and forsaken wisdom for clarity. I have, in short, frequently failed to practice the message that I am preaching to you—and to myself—tonight.

My hope is that this does not make me a hypocrite so much as a fellow traveler. And despite all of my failings, I have been graced with extraordinary teachers. My wife and my family—and the life that I have been blessed to have been given with them—continue to impress upon me, with every passing day, the enormous importance of living with uncertainty. My loved ones have been the kindest and most patient of guides, pointing me towards wisdom even when I have resisted, kicking and screaming.

Many years ago, I read that Isidor Rabi, the Nobel laureate in physics was once asked, "Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in your neighborhood?"

Rabi responded: My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: 'Nu? Did you learn anything today?' But not my mother. 'Izzy,' she would say, 'Did you ask a good question today?' That difference -- asking good questions -- made me become a scientist.

And so, every day for the past eleven years, I have sent my own children off to school with a parting suggestion: “Ask a good question today.” Here, too, I am, of course, largely preaching to myself aloud. Each morning, and throughout the long hours of the ensuing day, I am sorely tempted to offer answers. But slowly, incrementally, sometimes even painfully, my community teaches me to live the questions. You show me what it means to truly pray: God, rest in my heart and fortify me. Take away my hunger for answers.

Jane Hirschfield describes the difference between the pursuit of certainty and an open-ended life as the difference between a live blue Morpho butterfly and one pinned for display: “The dead butterfly’s beauty is precisely what it was, yet even a black and white ink sketch, in which almost everything is left out, holds more of the original vitality.” Why is this? Because the black and white sketch reveals the artist’s effort to capture the beauty of the moment without having to own it. The reward for letting go of certainty—for me and perhaps for all of us—comes in those moments of grace and beauty and receptivity, when God truly does abide within us, when our hopes triumph over our fears, when our hunger for answers abates, when we open our hearts to one another in the possibility of living the questions, together.

**********

Walt Whitman captures the joy we might find in living life’s questions in his poem from Leaves of Grass:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures were ranged in

columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to

add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he

lectured with much applause in the lecture

room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and

sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by

myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time

to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars

Our Judaism can guide us toward this same place, where we find contentment in uncertainty and blissful silence amidst the stars. The path isn’t easy. We have our fundamentalists, too: Jews who prize certainty and judgment over ambiguity and openness. And sometimes—even often—those fundamentalists are us. We’ve all been known to insist on our rightness: in our parenting, in our workplaces, in our relationships with partners and friends. We can all be overcome by our fears. We all reach for certainty when we ought to embrace doubt. Yet our tradition, with its vast, complex, and diverse fabric, is a great blessing. Isidor Rabi’s Jewishness was not incidental; Judaism is all about living with uncertainty and asking good questions.

The Talmud, that great sea of Jewish learning, law, and lore is full of questions. And although the Talmudic sages offer an immense array of answers to most of them, they also recognize that in this complex, mysterious, and often capricious life, there are some questions that rightfully remain unresolved. After page upon page of argumentation, the text will sometimes conclude with the word TEKU, an acronym for the phrase Tishbi yitaretz kushyot u-shealot—let this difficult question stand until Elijah comes to settle it in the time of the messiah. In the meantime, in our far from messianic age, we say, with Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust, “Truth is an aspiration, not a possession.” TEKU.

No one understood this better than the thirteenth century mystic Jallaludin Rumi. And so, on this first eve of our New Year, in this urgent hour, as each of us, as our people, as our nation and our world stand at a crucial juncture, between the fear that feeds the arrogance of our rightness and the hope that creates conversation and community, I leave you with the words of this Islamic Sufi poet:

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.

A parable: Once upon a time, a mysterious plague struck a village. When afflicted, its victims descended into a deep coma. Many fell ill, many died.

The terrible suffering of this village was compounded by a vexing problem: the healthy townspeople frequently could not tell if comatose victims were living or dead. When it was discovered that one unfortunate soul was buried alive, the town council convened an emergency session.

The councilmen and women pondered the situation. They discussed and debated for hours, then offered their solution: place a sharp stake in every coffin lid directly above the heart of each victim. This way, when the coffin’s lid was closed, all doubts about the victim’s condition would vanish.

The villagers praised their leaders’ wisdom and affixed the stakes to caskets prepared for the next set of victims. But just as they were about to shut the lid on the first of these deadly coffins, a dissenter raised his voice and proclaimed: “My friends, there is a better solution. Let us, instead, place food and water and a bell in each casket, for this way we may yet save lives.” The people took his words to heart, and did as he proposed.

Shortly thereafter the plague passed; many lives were indeed saved by the new procedure. The grateful townspeople generously rewarded the dissenter and asked what had enabled him to see things differently from the rest of the village. “How,” they inquired, “did you envision the solution that everyone else missed?”

The dissenter thought for a moment, then responded: “It’s all about the questions that we ask. The town council asked themselves: ‘How do we make sure that everybody we bury is dead?’ and they came up with an appropriate answer. But I posed a different question: ‘What if we bury someone alive?’—and thus I came to a different resolution. Sometimes asking the right question is a matter of life and death.”

For each and every one of us, the answers we arrive at depend upon the questions that we pose. If we hope to find solutions to our most perplexing problems, we must begin by asking the right questions. So on this Rosh Hashanah morning, we might consider: What are the best questions to reflect upon in the realm of moral decision-making? This is an issue of great importance, for if we are to turn in teshuvah, to correct our faults and failings, we must ask the right questions of ourselves, starting with why we so frequently make bad choices and lose our way.

Yet as I look back on the last thirty years, I find that in trying to understand these matters, I have wasted a lot of time pursuing solutions to the wrong problems. And I’ve been in good company. I have studied ethics pretty seriously for most of my adult life, and almost everything I have learned comes to answer “What is the proper course to take?” In my Jewish and secular schooling, I have wrestled with philosophy from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, navigated my way through the sea of Talmud, discussed, debated, and deconstructed moral reasoning in the Torah, codes and commentaries—all in search of answers to complex ethical dilemmas. The books and teachers guiding me on my journey have offered erudite, eclectic, and often very divergent perspectives. Still, for all of their diversity, each responds to the same fundamental inquiry: “What is the right thing to do and how do we know it?”

But lately I have come to believe that this is the wrong question. To my great chagrin, I now feel that many of the classes I have taught, and much of the rabbinic advice that I’ve dispensed constitute earnest but misguided attempts to solve the wrong problems. I have, alas, put more than my share of stakes into coffin lids when I might have offered food and water and a bell.

Why do I say this? As a rabbi, I have been involved in scores of counseling sessions with sincere men and women who come to me to confide their secrets, confessing transgressions that they have committed and feel guilty about. I’ve heard many good and decent people admit to a whole host of misdeeds, from adultery to xenophobia. And as I reflect on all of those sessions, I cannot recall a single instance in which the guilty party did not know at the time that what they were doing was wrong. Not once was their moral failure due to a lack of knowledge. In each and every instance, they realized the hurtful nature of their choices even as they made them—and yet they still chose to do wrong. No one comes to my office to hear me render judgment on their deeds; they come to ask for help in regaining the integrity that they have knowingly breached.

And when I hold this same mirror to my own ethical failings, I recognize that I, too, have not sinned out of ignorance so much as weakness of will. I, too, always know in my heart when I am making poor choices, even if I find clever ways to rationalize my misdeeds and don’t admit it to myself at the time.

And so I am convinced that the vast majority of our efforts to instill ethics fall flat because they are based on the fallacy that our misdeeds are failures of knowledge. This misleading notion dates back to Socrates and Plato, who taught that knowledge is virtue, that truly knowing the right thing will lead us to do it.

But knowledge isn’t virtue. If sin was the result of ignorance, then all of our PhDs would be moral geniuses. Unfortunately, the way we do education—even, or especially moral education—does not necessarily produce ethical people. Lest we forget, in 1930, Germany was considered the most refined and enlightened nation in the world. Surely history teaches us that, in fact, most of the knowledge we acquire does nothing to make us virtuous. Make no mistake, there are still many compelling reasons to pursue an excellent education, and even to study ethics. But debating how we know the good, or what course we should take in response to various moral dilemmas does not improve our character. In our ordinary lives, in the hundreds of choices we make each and every day, we almost always know the proper thing to do. The problem is that so often we just don’t do it.

So what are the right questions, the ones that shed real light, that help us turn in teshuvah and provide us with the hope that we might actually make better choices in the coming year? I believe that these questions are the ones posed by Rabbi Ira Stone in the introduction to his book, A Responsible Life.

He opens: What prevents me from doing what is good? If I know what is right, if I espouse a set of values that describe the good, why is it so difficult to act on that knowledge and those values?

If we know what is right—and we nearly always do—why do we so often fail to do it?

When we ask these questions, everything changes. We still may not come up with all the solutions, but we will, at least, be working on the right problems. Once we start down this path, we realize that what we need when we come to synagogue during these Days of Awe is not more information about how to distinguish between a mitzvah and sin. What we need is a set of tools and techniques to help us identify what leads us astray, to strengthen our will in times of temptation, and to make choices that live up to the values we know and espouse.

So where might we seek these tools? They can be found in many places—in work with good secular and pastoral counselors, in engagement with challenging art and literature, in time spent with ordinary men and women whose life journeys and experiences and even mistakes have brought them to wisdom. All of these sources, and many more, can provide us with skills to navigate our own passages with integrity.

But this morning, I would like to briefly share with you another path, which comes out of our sacred tradition. Like most Jewish wisdom, it is not new. Yet until recently, it has been little-known outside certain parts of the Orthodox world, and even now, it lacks the glitz and glamour of its cousin, kabbalah.

I speak of the way of Mussar, which you may know in passing from the latest issue of Reform Judaism magazine. If not, don’t worry—I’ll offer a few of the basics now, and invite you to join me in a short course that I’ll be teaching starting in November. And I begin with a caveat: I am the farthest thing from an expert myself. Even though my great-great-grandfather studied with the movement’s founder, Rabbi Yisrael Lipkin Salanter, in the great Mussar yeshiva in Slobodka, Lithuania, I am a newcomer, just starting down the path. But I have already found wisdom in the questions posed by the Mussar masters, and the answers that they offer.

The word “Mussar” means instruction; what it offers is a kind of map of the inner life and a body of practices we can use to transform our behavior.

The most basic premise of the movement is that each of us has a unique soul, made up of a bunch of traits known as middot. In his book Everyday Holiness, contemporary Mussar teacher Alan Morinis writes:

What sets one person apart from another is not whether we have certain traits while someone else has different ones, but rather the degree, or measure, of the traits that live in each of our souls. It’s all about the balance, the proportions. . . We should not try to rid ourselves of traits.

Each has its role, though some will exist in us in too high or too low a measure. Even things like anger, jealousy ,and lust are not intrinsically “bad”—they are just an imbalance.

The challenge, then, is to change our behavior by re-dressing our internal imbalances. Engaging in this work, which is known as tikkun middot ha-neshamah, repairing the traits of the soul, we move towards lives of greater integrity, decreasing the dissonance between our ideals and the real-life choices that we make.

This is classically done in three steps. Although I will summarize them in just a few moments, it is worth noting that their execution takes a lifetime. Here, too, the doing is much harder than the knowing.

The first step is to identify our challenges, the areas of imbalance that we most need to work on. This sets the agenda for everything that follows. There is no single recipe; each of us has our own assortment of middot to repair.

At this stage, as we chart a course for ourselves, our task is to pay very close attention to our actions, to cultivate heightened sensitivity to the choices we make and the feelings we encounter. Journaling can help. But if we are attentive, our work will present itself to us. As the Reform Judaism article on Mussar notes: Life will show you your spiritual curriculum, if you pay attention. Your closest relations—your partner, your parents, children—have been trying for decades to make you aware of it. Your close friends, too, are holding up a mirror in which your spiritual curriculum is reflected, as you have been holding up a mirror to theirs. The problem is that it’s much easier to be a genius about someone else’s spiritual curriculum than your own.

As you identify your spiritual curriculum, make a list of the traits that you need to focus on. While there is no fixed number of middot that must go on the list, it is common to choose thirteen. Mussar practice often involves working on each trait for a week at a time, then moving on to the next. Thus, if you choose thirteen middot and follow this custom every week, you will cover each trait four times over the course of a year.

And as you compile your list of middot, it is helpful to consider a wise piece of advice from Rabbi Eliyahu Dressler. He suggests that we should always emphasize the positive rather than dwelling on the negative. He taught: A person should always look for positive traits to focus on. The best way to reduce a negative trait is to build up another counterbalancing trait. Focus on the positive. So if you have a tendency towards excessive anger, work on a trait that embodies its opposite, say equanimity or humility. If you struggle with judgmentalism, try honor. It is much more effective to say “I will honor others” than “I won’t be judgmental.”

Once we identify the middot we wish to repair, we begin the second stage of our Mussar practice, which is know as kibbush, or “self-restraint.” This is the heart of the work, and it involves using a battery of time-tested techniques to shift our behavior.

One of these is the practice of reciting short phrases related to the middah that we are working on for the week. These phrases can be from Torah and other classic Jewish texts, but they can also come from secular literature or even your own journal. The key is to recite the phrase frequently in the morning and return to it over the course of the day. Some people set their phrases to music and chant them; I write mine on little index cards that I carry in my shirt pockets. So, by way of example, when I am working on the middah of faithfulness, of learning to let go of control, I will go through the day chanting a phrase from Ashrei, psalm 145: “Potayach et yadecha— Open your hand.” This reminds me of the importance of letting go, of approaching life with open hands and an open heart, of trusting in God.

There are many other Mussar tools that help on this stage of the journey—meditation, visualizations, daily study of traditional Mussar texts, nightly review of how we did in our practice over the course of the day. We’ll touch on all of these in our course this fall. But I want to offer an example of one more technique, which is that of kabbalot, or exercises to help improve traits that need repair. These are, essentially, practices we select to challenge ourselves.

Alan Morinis offers two examples: if you are working on generosity, try giving $1each to one hundred different people or causes over the course of a week. And if you are judgmental of others, focus on honor: “Assign yourself the task of offering a prompt and gracious greeting to every person you meet in the office, supermarket, or synagogue. This doesn’t have to involve anything flowery or creative; it just means being quick to offer “It’s nice to see you” rather than finding passing judgments and finding fault.”

The ultimate step in mussar work is known as tikkkun, or transformation. This does not come until after many years of practice, but it is a good goal to hold in our heads and our hearts as we procede along our journeys. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter describes it this way:

After the behavior is under control, the problematic soul imbalances are re-dressed, a new goal: to take root of the imbalance and transform it to good.

The first step is for one to overcome his nature so that he does not commit evil. The second is to change one’s nature so that she performs good. This second aspect, tikkun, is much more difficult than the first; it is far harder to transform one’s nature than to overcome it. First we find ways to ‘turn from evil’ and then we learn to ‘do good.’

All of this is difficult. Knowing the good is easy; learning to do it is arduous. Mussar work is designed to test us; it is very hard to repair imbalances that we have lived with for almost our entire lives. Change comes slowly, sometimes even imperceptibly. The challenge is to maintain patience, to avoid despair, to recognize that if we do the practice, over time, we can change our souls. Here, Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv offers an important dose of perspective, teaching: “It is the work of a lifetime. And that’s why you were given a lifetime in which to do it.”

My friends, in this sacred season, God calls us to turn in teshuvah, to return to the right path. This really is the work of a lifetime. But I believe that we all know that path when we see it. We feel its direction inwardly, and hear it in the voice of conscience that we carry with us everywhere and always.

The challenge is learning to stay on that path even when we are tempted to stray, to find tools that help us choose the good that we all instinctively recognize and know in our hearts. We all possess the moral compass to guide us; what we need is the will and the skills to use it properly. Mussar offers us a way to strengthen our will and to apply it well.

And so I conclude with the words of Rabbi Salanter, founder of the Mussar movement, my great great grandfather’s teacher, who defined the challenge with extraordinary eloquence: The Maharal of Prague created a golem, a living creature of clay, and this was a great wonder. But how much more wonderful to transform a corporeal human being into a mensch!

This is our calling in this and every new year—to transform ourselves into mensches. In 5769, may we know the good, and do it. May we learn, each and every one of us, to be a mensch.

An old Jewish legend teaches that each of us has a small bone called the luz that is indestructible. Located at the tip of the spine, it is said to contain the essence of the soul. Even if the entire body is destroyed, the luz does not decay; after we die, it continues to hold the unique spark of a person’s selfhood.

In his novel, Be My Knife, Israeli writer David Grossman offers a profound metaphorical interpretation of this teaching. He notes:

I used to play a little game with myself. I would try to guess the luz of the people I knew, design the final thing that would be left of them—that indestructible thing from which they will be reborn.

And in a recent interview in the magazine The Sun, Grossman, a self-described atheist, elaborates on this ancient teaching as contemporary parable:

Like the protagonist in the book, I would ask people what their luz is, and I got wonderful answers—people who told me about old loves, or their belief in God, or that their luz was parenthood. I want to believe that every human being has his or her essence. But my luz is not necessarily the same as yours, or my wife’s. If we are lucky, we get to be exposed to the luz of our loved ones.

Like David Grossman, I don’t literally believe in the luz, yet I, too, find this teaching extraordinarily insightful as metaphor, especially on this sacred Kol Nidre eve.

For Yom Kippur is, at heart, all about asking ourselves: “What is my luz?” The fasting and self-affliction offer a stark encounter with our mortality. For twenty-four hours, all pretense is stripped away. We glimpse our essential selves, for good and for bad. Sometimes we find that our luz, our essence, is not what thought it to be; there is a dissonance between what we claim to value most and where we actually spend our money, time and energy. On Yom Kippur we take a spiritual accounting of ourselves. We examine our luz, inquiring: at my core, am I the person that I wish to be? And when, inevitably, we find that we have serious work to do, we commit ourselves to teshuvah, to bridging the gap between who, at our essence, we aspire to be, and the people we have become.

This is as true for institutions as it is for individuals. Synagogues also have their luz, their essential character and culture that define their place in the world. And on the congregational level, too, Yom Kippur is a good opportunity to conduct an accounting, to ask ourselves, as a community, who we are and who we desire to be. What is our luz here at Ahavath Beth Israel? What is our congregation’s essential mission?

Our board has wrestled with this question a great deal in recent few years. And, God willing, we will continue to wrestle with it for many years to come. But last spring, we reached a milestone, as we completed a mission statement for our community. Its purpose is to remind us who we are, to identify our luz, and thus keep us on track when we might stray from our core concerns. Not surprisingly, it was difficult to arrive at such a statement. We argued a great deal amongst ourselves, searching for the proper priorities and the right words to express them. The end product is, of course, far from perfect. But we have found it to be a good compass for our collective journey.

I’ve provided a copy of the mission statement for each of you. It reads, simply:

Congregation Ahavath Beth Israel is a progressive synagogue dedicated to Torah (lifelong learning), Avodah (spiritual growth), G’milut Chasadim (acts of lovingkindness), and community building.

Over the course of this day of self-examination, I would like to focus on these words and the actions that they imply. Let’s consider them together, asking the hard questions: What is our luz? Who do we strive to be? And how do we get there?

Tonight I will focus on the first three parts—Torah, Avodah, and G’milut Chasadim; tomorrow morning I will look at community building. And I’ll say from the outset: I am not going to offer a state of the synagogue address. I couldn’t even begin to cover all the things we do in each area of our mission. My intent is, instead, to create conversation by sharing a few of my own thoughts on the challenges facing our CABI community. Take them as just this: a snapshot of your rabbi’s personal priorities. And then join the Yom Kippur discussion from noon until 2:00 pm tomorrow to offer your own perspective on these matters that so deeply concern us all.

Before we get to the heart of the mission, a few words on the opening declaration: Congregation Ahavath Beth Israel is a progressive synagogue.

We probably spent more time debating the language here than anywhere else in the entire statement. We argued for hours over whether to use the adjective “Reform.” In the end, we chose “progressive” instead. Although we are proud members of the Union for Reform Judaism, we did not want to define ourselves by strict movement guidelines. I’ve often heard Marty Geffon and some of our other longtime members refer to us as Reconformadox. For many years, we were the only Jewish address in town, and our history has taught us to embrace a wide spectrum of Jewish practice. Here at CABI the noun, Jewish, is more important than any adjective we attach to it. At the same time, we realize that we cannot be all things to all people. Part of our luz, our essence, is our progressive approach to Jewish life. We believe that God still speaks, that Jewish practice continues to evolve. We strive to balance the secular and the sacred, engaging the wider world as full citizens even as we strive to repair its broken places with wisdom drawn from our own rich tradition. Like Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, we believe that Jewish law and tradition get a vote but not a veto. And when we define ourselves as progressive, we proclaim our commitment to including all adult Jews as full shareholders in the covenant and community. We celebrate women as equal partners in public Jewish life and leadership, firmly rejecting all traditional distinctions based on gender. The women who lead our congregation remind us daily how ill-served we were when we relegated half the Jewish population to the private sphere.

And we proudly welcome gay and lesbian individuals and families into our community without asking them to deny fundamental parts of who they are. At CABI, our closets are for cleaning supplies, not people.

So, with that said, I shall move on to the three talmudic pillars of Jewish life, beginning with Torah, the pursuit of lifelong learning. Just under two years ago, I provoked a great deal of turmoil around this topic when I suggested that we put our religious school on hiatus and change our model of Jewish education. With the benefit of a little hindsight, I recognize that I made a serious error here.

My timing was terrible. In December of 2006, our school was in crisis. I saw this as an opening to create change, but I was wrong. We were at a nadir, and positive change rarely emerges out of weakness. Thankfully, we are now in a very different place. A team of smart, dedicated volunteers stepped in to fill the gap, and then our new education director, Nina Spiro brought her extraordinary energy and expertise to the task of renewing our school. Add to that the knowledge and creativity of Abi Taylor-Abt and, above all, the dedication of our incomparable team of talented teachers, dedicated parents and enthusiastic students, our religious education program is once again thriving. We have an innovative curriculum, expanded Hebrew program, and exciting new Jewish opportunities for our teens.

But while my timing was badly off back in 2006, my basic premise wasn’t. While our school is a healthy and happy place, the basic model that it follows remains badly broken. We’re still wandering in the wilderness, trying to imitate the secular schools, which are hardly paragons of success. Now that we are in a position of strength, properly provisioned for the journey, let’s move on towards the Promised Land, carefully considering our vision of Torah, of Jewish learning here at CABI.

We might begin with the premise that it is impossible to create committed Jews in a vacuum; we can’t educate kids without educating their extended families. To do that, we need new models. Surely we American Jews, the most educated and affluent diaspora community in Jewish history, can do better than the supplemental schools that Jewish kids have kvetched about for almost a hundred years. We need to think outside the box, drawing on the work of the best Jewish educators in our nation. I don’t pretend to possess the answers; all I ask is that you commit to making the journey with me, with open hearts and minds. Henry Ford famously quipped, “If I’d asked the people what they wanted, they would have said,

‘A better horse.’” We’ve built a better school; now we should begin to create something new and different, a community of learners, where young and old, singles and couples and families all learn Torah together. This inter-generational Torah study should center on Saturdays rather than Sundays, emerging out of our own Jewish calendar rather than that of our Christian neighbors. Together, we can learn Talmud and Torah, Mussar and midrash, holidays and Hebrew, looking at ancient texts in innovative ways. Jewish learning at CABI should give us the tools to find ourselves in our people’s past, present, and future.

The second pillar of Jewish life, and the next point in our mission statement is Avodah, spiritual service and growth. We’ve been busy here, with Shabbat Unplugged, Tot Shabbat, and holiday celebrations that open the richness of Jewish tradition to our growing community of young families. And next Friday evening, we will celebrate the long-awaited arrival of Mishkan Tefillah, the creative new Reform siddur.

But the lynchpin, the luz, the essence of Jewish spiritual life here at CABI and in our homes is Shabbat. It is said that “more than the people of Israel have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept Israel.” Now more than ever, this sacred day of rest represents our last, best hope to renew ourselves, our families and our community. Most of us constantly battle the clock, dashing from place to place and hour to hour. Our schedules leave little room for reflection. The problem with this rat race, as Lily Tomlin once noted, is that even if you win, you’re still a rat. And so the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie recently launched a Shabbat initiative, declaring: In our 24/7 culture, the boundary between work and leisure time has been swept away and the results are devastating. . . For our stressed-out, sleep-deprived families, the Torah’s mandate to rest is relevant and sensible. We are asked to put aside those Blackberries and stop gathering information, just as the ancient Israelites stopped gathering wood. We are asked to stop running around long enough to see what God is doing.

I hope that over the course of this new year, we will embrace this challenge to make Shabbat a more significant part of our lives. By opting out of the rat race at least one day a week, we sound a contemporary declaration of independence. Shabbat celebrates kinship and spiritual community. Each time we dedicate even a small part of our Shabbat to rest and renewal, we perform a radical act that helps to liberate the world. We also preserve our own souls.

Thankfully, the mitzvah of Shabbat is not an all or nothing proposal. We can recover the blessings of this weekly celebration at our own pace. Step by step, drawing on both the richness of our tradition and our own creativity, each of us can find a path to meaningful Shabbat observance. Try doing something each Saturday to make the day different from the rest of the week. Turn off your computer. Let the laundry sit. Don’t answer your cell phone. Walk in the foothills. Tend to your garden. Set down your wallet and avoid spending money—even the most enthusiastic shoppers might find joy in saying “no” to consumerism. Ride your bike. Watch a classic film together with family or friends.

Or follow a suggestion from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. He notes that some Orthodox families have a special box to hold all the things they do not need on Shabbat: pens, car keys, money-clips and the like. Late Friday afternoons, they pass around the Shabbos box and everyone drops in whatever they know should not be taken into sacred space. Then, stripped of all their tools and machines, they might truly pray, “God there is nothing I can do about these concerns, so I know it is in your hands. . .”

One need not be Orthodox to adopt this practice. Make a Shabbat box. Even if you put it away for just an hour or two rather than all day, fill it with things that are liberating to set aside: your cell phone, your laptop, maybe even your watch.

And don’t worry if whatever you do feels artificial at first; over time, new practices become routine. As the Talmud teaches, sh’lo lishma, ba lishma—that which is begun awkwardly gains strength and takes on a life of its own.

Still, as rewarding as it can be to celebrate Shabbat, I know that it is also challenging, even when we proceed in baby steps. It is hard to break old habits. And since the rest of the world doesn’t run by Jewish time, we are up against work and soccer and social engagements.

That is why Rabbi Yoffie’s Shabbat initiative is so important. The task is less daunting if we know we are in it with others. It’s both easier and more fun to make Shabbat in community. Our challenge here at CABI is to create opportunities to share Shabbat experiences, to learn from one another, in a supportive and non-judgmental way. We might start by gathering for Shabbat dinners and lunches, both here at shul and in our homes. Invite others from the CABI community—old friends and those who might become friends over challah, candles and wine. The meal need not be fancy; the magic lies in the way, when we break bread together, we create memories and communities that can last a lifetime.

Rabbi Harold Kushner tells the story of a group of tourists on safari in Africa. They had hired several native porters to carry their supplies while they trekked. After three days, the porters told them that they would have to stop and rest for twenty-four hours. The tourists asked: “Are you exhausted?” “No,” they replied, “but we have walked too far too fast and now we must wait for our souls to catch up to us.” Shabbat is the essential Jewish way of enabling our souls to catch up to us.

The third pillar of Jewish life, and the final piece of the mission statement I will address tonight is G’milut Chasadim, acts of lovingkindness. Within our own community, the Chicken Soup Group visits the sick, consoles the bereaved, and provides food for both body and soul. The Southern Idaho Jewish Welfare Fund offers tzedakah to those in need, and the Hevra Kaddisha performs the mitzvah of hesed shel emet, lovingly preparing the dead for burial. From birth to death, we take good care of one another.

But it is not enough to nurture our own community. As Hillel taught: U’ch’sh-ani l’atzmi, mah ani—If I am only for myself, what am I?

Part of our luz, our indestructible essence as progressive Jews, is our obligation to help repair the wider world. Here at CABI, for over a century, we have spoken and acted on the issues of the day. We lobby, petition and march. We stand against oppression and injustice. While we do not engage in partisan politics or endorse candidates, we know we cannot shy away from the political process, for this is where questions of ethics play out in real life. To be too cautious, to be apolitical in the public sphere, is a form of moral cowardice. As Elie Wiesel implores, We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. This is the central message of the Yom Kippur fast, and the haftarah portion from Isaiah that we will read tomorrow morning: an obsession with ritual piety without the passionate pursuit of justice is not just hypocritical; it is, in God’s eyes, an abomination.

This year we will have a unique opportunity to make a difference on what is perhaps the central issue of our age: the environmental crisis. At sunrise on April 8, 2009, the morning before Pesach begins, Jews around the world will observe a ritual that is performed only once every twenty eight years: Birchat HaChamah, the Blessing of the Sun. Traditionally, this commemorates the moment when the sun returns to the same place in the sky where it stood at the moment of its creation. As science, this is archaic. But as metaphor, it could not be more timely. On the Shabbat just before Birchat HaChamah, the haftarah portion comes from the book of Malachi, the prophet who proclaims: “The day shall be at hand that burns like a furnace.” One of our generation’s most creative teachers, Rabbi Arthur Waskow suggests that to help us confront the devastating effects global warming, we proclaim 5769 to be “The Year of Blessing the Sun” and dedicate our efforts to the search for sources of clean, renewable energy.

This is a place where our efforts matter. The environment concerns each and every one of us, rich and poor, young and old, liberal and conservative. As David Saperstein, the director of the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center in Washington, notes: Imagine what might happen if our nation’s entire religious community decided to galvanize our resources to address the environmental crisis. The potential is staggering. There are, after all, more houses of worship than any other public institution in America, far more than libraries, hospitals, schools, and firehouses combined. More than 300,000 churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams, and temples in America, and millions across the globe. If every one of them, starting with our own, engaged in a serious effort to conserve energy, to recycle, to clean up our neighborhoods and plant trees, to speak out on environmental policy for their billions of congregants, what a transformation of the environment we would see!

In this year of Blessing the Sun, we should hear God’s call to heal our scorched earth. Interestingly—and not coincidentally—when written without vowels, the traditional name for our High Holy Day prayer book, machzor, can also be read as michzur, the modern Hebrew word for recycling. On this sacred Kol Nidre eve, we pray that the words of the machzor inspire us to michzur, to recycle and renew the wonders of God’s creation. Here at CABI, Gretchen Hecht and Luanne Ostrow will be chairing a new “Green Synagogue” committee. Please join us as we seek to be better stewards of the earth in our own daily practices. We have already begun a recycling program and undergone an energy audit. But there is so much more work to do. I hope we will start carpooling to shul, xeriscaping our grounds with native desert plants, and eating a lot less meat, for, as a 2006 UN initiative concluded, modern practices of raising animals for food contribute on a "massive scale" to deforestation, air and water pollution, land degradation, loss of biodiversity, and global climate change. For Jews, eating has always been an ethical matter at least as much as it is a bodily function; the time has come to make ecological awareness an integral part of our practice of kashrut.

Jewish tradition teaches, “The day is short and the task is great. It not incumbent upon us to complete the work; but neither are we free to desist from it.” Our community’s new mission statement challenges us to embody Torah, lifelong Jewish living; Avodah, spiritual growth; and Gemilut Chasadim, acts of lovingkindness. It reminds us that these things constitute our luz, they are the essence of who we are, of who we strive to be. I’ve shared just a few of my own ideas—you will, I pray, add many of your own. This is, unquestionably, an ambitious calling.

My friends, we are a diverse community; we need not concur on all the details in order to move forward. But we must agree to aim high, to live by the better angels of our nature. Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College and mentor to Martin Luther King once said: The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn’t a calamity to die with dreams unfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is no disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim, is a sin.

Sometimes we will fail, but mostly, if we are true to the best that is within us, as individuals and in community—if we remember and nurture and sustain our luz, our essential Jewish selves—then surely we shall mostly succeed.

The Kotzker Rebbe once asked his Hasidim: “If I spend my life pretending to be someone else, who will be me?”

And so for each of us. If we at Congregation Ahavath Beth Israel spend our lives pretending to be someone or something else, who will be us? We have our own sacred calling, our own mission in our community and beyond.