Sermons for the Days of Awe, 2009

Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin

Temple Israel

Columbus, GA

How Alphabet Browne Got It (Or Most of It) Wrong

Erev Rosh Ha Shanah

I would like to tell you a story that I have plucked from the rich history of this great congregation. I learned much of this history from one of the most gracious women I know – from my dear friend Janice Rothschild Blumberg, the widow of Rabbi Jacob Rothschild of The Temple in Atlanta, and some of it from another gracious woman, our own Jean Kent, who is the official historian of Temple Israel.

In the realm of religious trivia and American Jewish history, let the record note: I am the second rabbi at Temple Israel who has also been the rabbi of The Temple in Atlanta.

Let me reach back into the story of Temple Israel and tell you about my predecessor.

His name was Edward Benjamin Morris Browne. He had numerous names and numerous academic credentials, which he always appended to his signature – LL.B; LL.D; A.M; B.M; D.D.; M.D. – and therefore Brown earned himself the nickname of "Alphabet" Browne.

Alphabet Browne was born in Hungary in 1845. He then came to the United States where he became a physician (please remember this detail of his life). Then he became a lawyer. Then, he studied for the rabbinate, and the man who ordained him was none other than the great organizer of American Reform Judaism, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise.

In 1877, Rabbi Browne became the rabbi of The Temple in Atlanta (and, by the way, Janice Rothschild Blumberg is his great-granddaughter). Back in those days, The Temple in Atlanta was Orthodox in the American Orthodox style of its time. But Alphabet Browne was a reformer. He instituted such changes as the organ, and the choir, and confirmation. He was a prominent public intellectual. He lectured in churches on the topic: “Did the Jews Kill Jesus of Nazareth?”

He was a firebrand. The Atlanta Constitution remembered him as a man (and here I quote) “whose most striking characteristic is his capacity for getting into trouble." Who could invent a life like this? You can’t make this stuff up!

In 1885, when Ulysses S. Grant died, Rabbi Browne was the official Jewish pallbearer at his state funeral. (Just think of that for a moment: official Jewish pallbearer at a state funeral. What happened to that position?) However, as Jean Kent mentioned in her history of Temple Israel: Because the funeral happened on Shabbat, Rabbi Browne refused to ride to the funeral, and so he walked instead.

He wrote a book about the Talmud. He had a publisher. At the last minute the publishers reneged. This is really too bad, because the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati has in its collection an order form for the book. The book cost four dollars. The address on the order form is Cambridge, Massachusetts. The man who ordered it was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

And now, the absolute kicker: Alphabet Browne was the rabbi here at

Temple Israel at the time of the first Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897. Alphabet Browne was a Zionist, a very early Zionist, perhaps one of the first Zionists in Reform Judaism. In those days, that was an outrageously courageous position to take – for let the record note that the Reform Judaism of the 1890s – through the 1930s and much of the 1940s – was officially anti-Zionist or at best, non-Zionist.

Nevertheless, this congregation gave Rabbi Browne the freedom to travel to Basle. And because of the great wisdom and vision of our leaders in the late 1890s, Alphabet Browne was one of the few Reform rabbis to attend that first Zionist Congress.

It turns out that Alphabet Browne was personally friendly with Theodor Herzl. This is what he wrote to Herzl (and I repeat: You can’t make this stuff up): “Should Palestine not be available to us, there is this beautiful place called….Florida.”

This is not my sloppy attempt at standup comedy. I am not joking! Browne offered Florida to Herzl as a Jewish homeland – which, come to think of it, it is.

We can only wonder: How would history have been different if Herzl had taken Florida? Would the Jewish National Fund have taken on the task of draining the swamps of Alligator Alley? Would Jewish schoolchildren be planting trees in Orlando? Would the Palestinians now be fighting us for Boca? Would West Palm have become the West Bank? I repeat: You cannot make this stuff up.

But, even with everything else that he did, Rabbi Browne had time to worry. What did he worry about? The American Reform movement was barely ten years old, but Rabbi Browne worried that Reform Judaism would go too far…that Reform Judaism would cease to be Jewish…that it would be a Judaism that would only crave acceptability…and that it would be a Judaism that would have nothing to say to the ages or to the world.

And so it was, one hundred and twenty years ago, in 1889, Rabbi Alphabet Browne preached these words:

“The state of American Judaism is getting worse still. Wait five years, ten years longer and the Jewish pulpit will be the seat of religious infidelity and atheism. You will have no Sabbath, no Yom Kippur, no milah. The schochet [the ritual slaughterer] is already gone; the mohel [the ritual circumciser] is soon to follow.”

Rabbi Browne was following a venerable Jewish tradition. For Jews, worrying is an aerobic sport. Some of you are old enough to remember telegrams. Do you know the definition of a Jewish telegram? “Start worrying; details to follow.” Every generation of Jews believes itself to be the last. That is why the great Jewish historian Simon Rawidowicz once called the Jews “the ever-dying people” – which of course means that if we are an ever-dying people, then we will never die.

Alphabet Browne may have been right about many things. He was right to have walked to President Grant’s funeral. He was right to have been a Zionist. He was wrong to have offered Florida to Herzl. But he was wrong about the future of American Judaism. In the words of his contemporary, Mark Twain: The reports of the death of American Judaism have been greatly exaggerated.

One hundred and twenty years ago, Alphabet Browne predicted that the Jewish pulpit would be the seat of religious infidelity and atheism. I beg to differ. We Jews think more about spirituality and theology and belief and faith today than we did in 1889. Go to any bookstore; look at any synagogue bulletin, surf the Internet, and you will see what I mean.

One hundred and twenty years ago, Alphabet Browne predicted that we would have no more Sabbath. I beg to differ. It is true that most American Jews might not walk to a presidential funeral. But as we American Jews confront the disappointments of career and the scars of relentless 24/7 ambition; when we realize that we have inherited a workaholic culture that views joblessness as not only an economic wound but also a psychic and spiritual wound – we have come to realize that we need Shabbat.

Alphabet Browne predicted that soon there would be no Yom Kippur. I beg to differ. Yom Kippur still exercises a visceral hold on the American Jewish soul. In some deep way we sense, in ways that the mind cannot know, in ways that utterly contradict all of our alleged rationalism, that we are on trial for our lives, and we will not miss our court appearance.

Alphabet Browne predicted that there would be no milah, no more ritual circumcision. Again, I beg to differ. Yes, there has been a lot of medical controversy about whether circumcision is necessary. But we Jews don’t view it as a medical issue, and not as mere surgery. We have held onto Western religion’s most ancient ritual. Jews gave their lives rather than not circumcise their sons, and that history has power over us.

Alphabet Browne believed that the schochet [the ritual slaughterer] was already gone. He believed that kashrut was dead. Once again, I beg to differ. The issue of kashrut is so alive and well that a rabbi in Atlanta is suing the state of Georgia over its kashrut laws. It may not be what many of us do, but the Jews still think about this and it is Judaism and it is far from dead.

Fast forward. Some of us are the direct descendants of Rabbi Browne’s congregants. And many of us are doing everything we can to prove him wrong.

How do you know if you are proving old Rabbi Browne wrong?

If you have committed yourself to growing and learning as a Jew, then you are proving him wrong.

If you actively believe that the mission of this synagogue is to grow Jews and to create Jews, then you are proving him wrong.

If you want your children to grow up with a strong, unshakeable, substantive Jewish identity, then you are proving him wrong.

If you believe that we can instill worship with joy and with passion and with meaning and with power and with purpose and that God needs for us to be active participants in worship and not a passive audience, then you are proving him wrong.

If you are actively working to create the American Jewish future in this corner of the American Jewish diaspora, then you are proving him wrong.

And some of you are saying to yourselves at this very moment: Rabbi, I want to be among those who are proving Rabbi Browne wrong! How do I do it?

I’m glad you asked.

Remember that I told you that Alphabet Browne was also a doctor? He was not the first rabbi-doctor in history. That distinction probably goes to the greatest Jewish thinker of all time, who was also a doctor. You already know this. His name was Maimonides, who lived in the 1100s in Spain and North Africa, and who is the subject of many scholarly and popular biographies. Maimonides was the greatest theologian in the history of the Jewish people, and probably wrote the best book in the history of theology. He was also a codifier of Jewish law, and a counselor and comforter of Jews, and yes, he was a great physician who may even have treated King Richard the Lionhearted of England during the Crusades.

Someone once asked Maimonides: Why did God give us 613 mitzvot? This is how Maimonides answered. God gave us 613 mitzvot for a very important reason: so that every Jew would find one to do -- with love. God wants us to try to find the mitzvah that has our name on it…the mitzvah that we are ready to do with love.

I am here to show you the sacred possibilities. Find the mitzvah, find the commandment, find that piece of the covenant that has your name on it. Find that piece of the covenant, and do it with intensity and with commitment and with love.

As we, a kehillah kedosha, a sacred community, enter a new year together; let us turn this into a congregational project. It will be the first of its kind in American Jewish history.

Just think of it, an entire congregation that is dedicating itself to proving a former rabbi wrong.

Go ahead. Prove Alphabet Browne wrong.

Getting God Un-Stuck

Rosh Ha Shanah Morning

Here’s the math. If I have been a rabbi for almost thirty years that means that I have been preaching on the Days of Awe for almost thirty years. This means that I have given approximately thirty sermons on what you and I would call one of the most difficult readings in the Bible – that reading that we shared this morning – the akedah, the binding of Isaac.

And yet, here comes the confession, which is appropriate for this season of repentance. In thirty years of thinking about the binding of Isaac, I have thought a great deal about Abraham, and I have thought a great deal about Isaac, and I have even thought a great deal about the two servants who went with them to Mount Moriah, and I have especially thought about Sarah, who doesn’t even make a cameo appearance in the story. But I have never given much thought to the ram – that poor ram that winds up with his horns – how does the text put it? – ne’echaz ba-svach b’karnav – stuck in the thicket by his horns.

So I am going to forego all traditional understandings of the poor aforementioned ram and simply focus this morning on that sense of being stuck in the thicket – or, to put it simply, I want to talk about being stuck.

Every year when we approach the Days of Awe, we find ourselves confronting the fact that some people are stuck. Some families are stuck. And some synagogues are stuck (not ours, apparently and thankfully).

But now comes my point for this morning: Our way of talking about God is stuck – no less stuck than that sweet, hapless ram whose horns are stuck in the thicket.

What do I mean when I say that our way of talking about God is stuck?

Our way of talking about God is like the malfunctioning drawbridge over Lake Worth in Florida that caused me to be grievously late for lunch with my father. It is stuck in the vertical position.

When I say that our way of talking about God is stuck in the vertical position, I think that you know what I mean. You know what I mean because you are here, as you’ve been sitting here or in another synagogue for every Rosh Ha Shanah and Yom Kippur of your Jewish lives.

I invite you to think about the God of this season’s liturgy -- the God Who sits enthroned on high; the God Who judges our every action, the God Who, we imagine, decides who shall live and who shall die, the God Whom we call today and throughout these ten days of repentance, Avinu Malcheinu.

We have a vertical relationship with that God. God’s up there; we’re down here. And for many of us, the God whom we approach in breathless, almost terrified awe – for many of us, that God is stuck in the vertical position.

Some of you have told me – as many other Jews have told me over the years – that this version of God troubles you. God, the beta version. That version of God is too limiting for you, and for many Jews.

It reminds me of something that happened to me a few years ago in a previous congregation. A woman came to see me and told me that she hated Judaism and that she hated the Torah and that, frankly, she didn’t have much use for God either, come to think of it. When I asked her what the problem was (and voicing silent gratitude that she had not asked me for the good old “I don’t like God” synagogue dues discount), she told me this: “Every time I come to temple, he’s gonna kill the kid, then he doesn’t kill the kid. What do I need that for?”

A certain amount of forensic probing revealed that my questioner came to synagogue once a year – and only once a year. That once a year occasion just happened to be this morning, the morning of Rosh Ha Shanah. That meant that the only biblical story she had ever heard was the story of the almost-sacrifice of Isaac.

No wonder that she felt that way! “No wonder you feel that way,” I said to her. “You’ve missed the rest of God!” This is why it is dangerous for your theological health to only come to synagogue on the Days of Awe. Because you only get awe and distance.

When you consider that this prime time version of God happens to be God as King and Sovereign and Judge and Arbiter – well, you get the problem. It makes me want to add a verse to that old standard “Wonderful World” –

“Don’t know much about theology.” How could we? Just as Abraham looked up and saw the ram stuck in the thicket by its horns, our God-talk has been stuck in the thicket by its horns.

Please understand the price that we pay for having our God-talk stuck in the thicket by its horns. The price we pay is the large number of Jews who want something more – people (and you know them) who say: I’m spiritual, not religious. For them, religion is about awe and distance. Spiritual is about, well, love and intimacy. That is the God they want.

The price we pay is the cottage industry of books on – there is no other way of putting it – popular atheism. You can walk with me over to the religion section of Barnes and Noble. Right within the religion section, next to Judaism and Christianity and Islam and Buddhism, you will find the anti-religion section.

Let me pull some books off the shelf for you. In his book Breaking The Spell, Daniel Dennett says that parents who raise their children within a religious structure are actually harming them – his words now -- by teaching them ignoble lies. In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins says that while it is terrible that certain religious leaders abuse children, religion itself is a far worse abuse of children.

In his book God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens calls on humanity to destroy religion once and for all. He implores us: "To escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection ... to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it."

Or, if movies are more your thing, come with me to Blockbuster Video and let’s rent Bill Maher’s film Religulous. For Bill Maher, religion is irrational; it is only for the mentally infirm, those who are terrified and those who like to terrify others; it sells an “invisible product;” it’s worse than irrational – it’s dangerous.

I am tempted to quote the great Yiddish poet Jacob Glatshtein, who wrote: The god of my unbelief is very great.” But, because neither Dawkins or Hitchens or Maher reveal any evidence of having read any sophisticated books on religious thought; because they base most of their complaints on the weakest of theological input; because they betray no evidence of having experienced the real lives that religious people in fact really do live -- I am even more tempted to muse that, in truth, God deserves better atheists.

And so, you are asking me now: How can we get this vertical image of a monarchical, judging God out of the stuck position?

The “fix” is in the hymn Ki Anu Amecha, which is a liturgical poem that dates back to the Middle Ages. We will be singing it on Yom Kippur, when we need to hear it the most. We are Your people…You are our King…We are Your children, You are our Father…We are Your possession, You are our portion…We are Your flock….You are our Shepherd…We are Your vineyard….You are our keeper…We are Your Friend…You are our Beloved.

Pay attention to what that song is teaching us about how our relationship to God can evolve.

We are Your people; You are our King. That’s the transcending, awe inspiring God of distance. Think about how we think about kings and queens. In the ancient world, and in the medieval world, and in most of human history, most people would never have seen a king or a queen in person. To this day, most people will never meet a king or queen in person. We can live with God as King or Monarch. But not as a constant part of our diet. For many of us, I suspect that this particular image of God will become – forgive me – a royal pain.

Do you remember the movie The Queen, with Helen Mirren playing Queen Elizabeth the Second? Do you remember that sense of emotional distance that the royal family demonstrated in the wake of Princess Diana’s death? Do you remember how the British public longed for their Queen to be less of a Queen…perhaps to be more maternal….more vulnerable….more emotionally available for them?

So we start the song with God as King. We journey through a smorgasbord of images of God. And by the time the song is over, God has morphed into our beloved. We are now face to face with the God Who loves us passionately, and Whom we can love passionately....so much that it is almost (but only almost) as if the boundaries between us temporarily dissolve…like the way it is when you are deeply and uncontrollably in love.

I wish that more of us could meet this God. This is what our atheist authors cannot understand. This is what our spiritual seekers want to understand. At the heart of any religion there is a flaming fire of someone's love of God, someone’s ecstasy, someone’s encounter with some kind of burning bush. Is it possible, then, that organized religion, everyone's favorite whipping boy, is nothing less than the process by which that fire cools down?

Or is it possible that we are afraid of the fire and heat of the love of God? It’s dangerous to love God too much. That’s what creates religious fanatics and zealots and those who believe that only their love of God, only their way of loving God, is the right way.

So, we think to ourselves, let's play it safe. Let’s not play with fire. Let’s turn the heat down. That means that we might turn the thermostat too far down and we, forgive me, chill out.

As for me, well, I would far rather turn the heat up on our love of God.

Because that passionate love of God is there, right in the middle of our tradition.

The mystics of the city of Safed knew how to love God that way. One of their poets was a man named Eliezer Azikri. He was amazing. He actually led a small group of people who devoted themselves to gathering in silence. Later in his life he actually drew up a ketubah between himself and God, in which heaven and earth were the witnesses to the marriage.

Listen to one of his poems:

To be lit up in your light always.

Talking with him, walking with him,

In silence with him

Sitting with him

Standing with him

And all my movements are for him.

That, my friends, is love.

Consider this. We have just completed the Jewish month of Elul. It is spelled alef lamed vav lamed. Some say that this is an abbreviation for Ani l’dodi v’dodi li – I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine, from the Song of Songs.

That’s what God and we have been saying to each other for the past four weeks. We’ve been looking for each other. God looks back with nostalgia on the days of our courtship: Zacharti lach chesed neurayich: I remember the love of your youth, how you followed me in a wilderness that was unsown, God says.

God hears the shofar and God says: Hey, baby, they’re playing our song. That was the music that played at our wedding at Sinai. Wow. I remember that. I'm not letting you go.

As you know by now, today is Rosh Ha Shanah. And as you also know by now, it is also Shabbat. According to tradition, we do not blow the shofar on Shabbat. The short reason is that the act of carrying it to the synagogue is considered forbidden work. We blow it because at Temple Israel we only officially celebrate one day of Rosh Ha Shanah, as opposed to two, and in a very real sense, most of us would say to ourselves that without the shofar, it’s not really Rosh Ha Shanah.

But I will tell you that there is a historic precedent for blowing the shofar on Shabbat. I will tell you that when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, the sages fled to the coastal city of Yavneh. There at Yavneh they held emergency meetings that lasted for years. There at Yavneh, they created a new kind of Judaism that didn’t need the sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. There at Yavneh, on one particular Shabbat, Yochanan ben Zakkai, the leader of the sages, did the unthinkable. He blew the shofar. Outrageous! Completely contrary to tradition! We have to blow the shofar, Yochanan said, because it’s like the blast of a siren. We are in state of emergency. Everything we knew, everything we loved, not just the Temple, our entire world of meaning has been destroyed. We cannot bring that world back, but perhaps, he said, if we blow the shofar, we can begin to create again and anew.

We are now in a time of emergency as well. It is a time of spiritual emergency. What the hour dictates is that we refuse to lose Jews because they cannot find the God they crave in our tradition or in our texts. We must say to every Jew: Just as God is infinite, the images of God are infinite. There is an image of a loving God and a lovable God that is waiting for you. We are not going to let you off that easy.

If the problem is belief, then the answer is not believing less, but believing more.

 “All names and titles of God, whether Hebrew or not Hebrew, reveal but a small and dim spark of the hidden light toward which the soul really yearns and to which it calls out.” Those are the words of Rav Kook, the first chief rabbi of pre-State Palestine. All that we say and think about God; all that we teach and sing about God; all that we think we know about God – these are all radical understatements.

They are only sparks of what we think we know and what we think we want to know. But those sparks are there and if you tend them and if you poke them with a stick, they will flame into a fire. For our sake and for God’s sake, fan that flame.

You Never Know

Kol Nidre

On erev Rosh Ha Shanah, I told you the story of Rabbi Alphabet Browne, who was the spiritual leader of both this temple and The Temple in Atlanta. Tonight, on Kol Nidre, on the eve of Yom Kippur, I would tell you yet another story from the hidden history of southern Jewry.

One of the first rabbis in New Orleans was an Orthodox rabbi named Bernard Illowy. In 1864, Rabbi Illowy confronted a question that now we would find to be what the Talmud would call a “no brainer,” but back in 1864 it was a real issue.

The question was this: Was it permissible for a mohel to ritually circumcise the son of a Jewish father and a gentile mother?

His response was no, it was not permissible to do a bris for that child. One mohel, a certain Mr. Goldenberg, refused to follow his instructions – and for that, Rabbi Illowy forbade the Jews of New Orleans from using his services.

But, apparently Rabbi Illowy had doubts about whether he was right. So, following good rabbinic tradition, he sent letters to several prominent European rabbis and he asked for their opinions.

A number of those rabbis agreed with him, but one rabbi dissented. The lone dissenter was Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer. He was a German Orthodox rabbi, a man of remarkable broad Jewish and secular learning, one of the leading Jewish legal authorities of nineteenth century Europe. In his response, Rabbi Kalischer said that he had great respect for Illowy and all the other rabbis who had voiced their opinions. Nevertheless, he believed that they were wrong.

These are his words: “It is both permissible and a mitzvah to circumcise such children. We grant much merit to the father who wants to have his son circumcised and brought into the covenant of our people. If we respect his good will and circumcise his son, then we will have extended them a hand…and with children such as these [now listen carefully] mi yodea, who knows? There is sometimes the possibility that great leaders of Israel will arise from among them.”

On one level, that story is about outreach and how we deal with matters of conversion and Jewish identity.

On another level, it is about humility and self-awareness. Rabbi Illowy was both wise enough and secure enough to not only re-think his earlier opinion, but to seek out advice, and then to change his mind.

On yet another level, it is about the expansive humanity and wisdom of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, who (let the record note) was not exactly a Reform Jew by any means.

But on the deepest level, we find the inner meaning of that story in those two little words: mi yodea? Who knows? Or, in the words of the prophet Isaiah: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are My ways your ways, says the Lord…. But as the heavens are high above the earth, so are My ways high above your ways, and My thoughts above yours” (Isaiah 55:8).

There really is a reason why things happen. It is because God’s ways are high above our ways, and God’s thoughts are above our thoughts.

Yom Kippur, of all days in the Jewish calendar, asks us to re-think our place in the world and in the universe. It bids us to realize that we are not in charge of everything. It forces us to understand that while each of us is the main author of our own Book of Life, ours is not the only hand that writes that Book.

For the last fifteen years of my father’s professional life, he taught photography at a vocational high school in New York. These were mostly kids who had no real academic aptitude. Many of them wound up in this program because the system had no other place for them.

This past winter, I was visiting my father in Florida. He casually mentioned to me that he had gotten an email from one of his old students. Mind you, my father retired in 1985. “Somehow he tracked me down. He sent me this email telling me that he was now a very successful fashion photographer in Europe and that he was doing really well…and he wanted to thank me for having had such an influence on him.”

“That’s wonderful, Dad.” “I guess it is,” he said, “But here’s the funny thing. For the life of me, I can’t remember this kid at all.”

My father thought that he was going into teaching because he loved photography. My father thought that he was going into teaching because it allowed him to use his talents. My father thought that he was going into teaching because it was a secure job that came with a pension.

But now it turns out that there was really only one reason my father went into teaching. He needed to teach that long-ago forgotten student who grew up to become a successful photographer.

This may have been a kid who no one else had believed in. Maybe he had failed every other subject. Maybe that’s how he wound up in my father’s program. It doesn’t matter. My father saved his life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald put it this way: "You never know exactly how much space you occupy in people's lives." My father never knew how much space he would occupy in that student’s life. He knows now.

He got that email from his former student the day before his birthday – and I don’t think he could have asked for a better gift.

Mi yodea? Who knows? You never know. As the heavens are high above the earth, so are “My ways high above your ways, and My thoughts above yours.”

Another testimony, a little closer to home.

Probably a few of you recognize the name Rabbi James Wax. For many years, he was the rabbi of our sister Reform congregation, Temple Israel in Memphis. As you know, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and it was because of Rabbi Wax’s voice that a certain measure of calm existed in that troubled city.

Back in the 1930s, James Wax was a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Back in those days, as in these days, Hebrew Union College sent students out to serve small Congregations – much smaller and in far more remote places than this one. And so, young Jimmy Wax finds himself in East Shemini Atzeret, Mississippi. It’s a small synagogue that consists of maybe forty households. There are maybe ten students in the religious school – tops.

It’s a Sunday morning and soon-to-be Rabbi Wax is doing the religious school assembly. Half of the students are absent. That leaves five students. He had prepared a much greater program for the assembly, but he wanted to save it for a time when all the kids were there.

And so, resorting to Plan B, he tells the students about what it’s like to be a student rabbi. He tells the students all about Hebrew Union College and all about the far off magical city of Cincinnati, Ohio – and then, right at the end of his little talk, he says to them, somewhat off the cuff: “We have students at Hebrew Union College who need scholarships, so if any of you ever want to do something nice, you might think of giving a little tzedakah to Hebrew Union College.”

End of assembly. The kids get up and they go home.

Lo and behold, there are two brothers in that little group of students. Lo and behold, they never marry and they never have children. And also lo and behold, they become successful businessmen. Very successful businessmen. It turns out that they decided to leave their entire very sizable fortune to Hebrew Union College as a permanent endowment. All because of that little unprepared impromptu throw away talk that Rabbi James Wax gave many decades before -- in that little synagogue in Mississippi.

Mi yodea? Who knows? You never know. “As the heavens are high above the earth, so are My ways high above your ways, and My thoughts above yours.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not as if we have no free will. We are not God’s marionettes. We can do whatever we want to do.

But know that there is a script to this great theatrical production that we call life…and we did not entirely write it on our own. There is a Director who is off-camera, and in the theater of life we must sometimes simply show up and read the script and hope for the best. You know the Yiddish word, even if you don’t know a word of Yiddish. The word is bashert. Some things are just meant to be.

In some ways, it’s like the midrash about the ram in the story of the binding of Isaac. Abraham took his son Isaac to Mount Moriah to be sacrificed, and at the last possible moment, he saw a ram caught by its horns in the thicket and offered the ram instead.

Now, about that ram. How did he get into the thicket in the first place? Did he just happen to be there?

The midrash says that God created the ram on the sixth day of creation, right before Shabbat…and that God placed the ram in the Garden of Eden by a small pond of water…just waiting for that moment…and then an angel came and plucked the ram out of Eden and stuck him in the thicket. No doubt the ram wasn’t happy about this. But it was for that precise moment that the ram was created.

Like the man in the story of Joseph….the nameless man who found Joseph wandering in the fields and sent him to find his brothers who were pasturing their flocks. Because that man found Joseph, Joseph found his brothers and his brothers sold him into slavery and Joseph got down into Egypt and the brothers followed Joseph into Egypt and we became slaves in Egypt and we got out of Egypt and we got the Torah at Sinai….well, you get the picture.

Face it: that nameless man, who according to one midrash was really the angel Gabriel, was without question the most important person in Jewish history.

Mi yodea? Who knows? You never know. ‘As the heavens are high above the earth, so are My ways high above your ways, and My thoughts above yours.”

If I say the name Victor Frankl, some of you will know who that is. Victor Frankl was one of the greatest psychiatrists of our age and the author of one of the most influential books of our time, Man’s Search for Meaning. One night, in the wee hours, the phone rang at the Frankl home. On the line there was a desperate man threatening to commit suicide. He insisted that Frankl give him a good reason why he should not kill himself. Frankl offered every reason he could think of, and finally he persuaded the caller to meet him at an all-night coffee shop in a nearby neighborhood.

The two sat and talked for a while. Frankl asked him, “Why did you call me? Had you read my books?” “No,” answered the man. “Actually, I’d never heard of you. I was in trouble and needed someone, so I went to the psychiatrist listings in the phone book and to be perfectly honest, I picked your name out at random.”

Frankl was a little taken-aback. “Well, which of my arguments convinced you?” “Dr. Frankl, I don’t mean to offend you,” the man said, “but not a single argument of yours changed my mind. None of them were good enough to persuade me to live.”

Frankl was a bit exasperated and he asked, “So why did you decide to live?” The man answered, “I called you in the middle of the night. You don’t know me from a hole in the wall. But you spent hours on the phone with me, and then you even agreed to meet me in the middle of the night in this coffee shop. I figured that if my life could mean so much to a complete stranger, it ought to mean something to me, too.”

A random phone call and a man who cared enough to get out of bed in the middle of the night and chat about matters of life and death with a stranger.

Mi yodea? Who knows? You never know. “As the heavens are high above the earth, so are My ways high above your ways, and My thoughts above yours.”

You never know the exact moment that you make an impact on someone’s life.

It may be like a point of light that dances for a while before it settles on its target. This means that in many things you can never know exactly how well you are doing.

It means that at any given precise moment, you cannot truly evaluate how successful you are.

It means that success comes later, and failure doesn’t come that quickly either.

I say this in particular to those in our midst who are parents and teachers and mentors, and to those who are physicians and lawyers and often business people and writers and artists. You never quite entirely know the seeds that you are planting. You just never know.

This is exhilarating and terrifying. But as the Hasidic sage Zadok Ha-kohen taught: At its deepest level, faith is the belief that life is meaningful and that things happen for a reason.

Or, to put it in a different way: We get the jigsaw puzzle pieces – but only God gets the picture on the cover of the box.

In the Unetaneh Tokef, it says that God is zocheir kol ha-nishkechot. God remembers all the forgotten things. They go on our record. They go into our Book of Life.

Many of us obsess about the bad things that we have done that we have forgotten and that we have blotted out and repressed from memory. But we must also live with the faith that there are good things that we have done that we have also blotted out and repressed from memory.

According to a Hasidic teaching, if you have forgotten the sins that you have committed, that’s all right. God will remember them for you. If you have forgotten the mitzvot that you have performed, that’s also all right. God will remember them for you.

I learned this story from Rabbi Larry Kushner, who heard it from Rabbi Shifra Penzias, who heard it from her father Arno Penzias, who won the Nobel Prize for physics.1 He was born in Germany. At the age of six he was among the Jewish children evacuated to Britain as part of the Kindertransport rescue operation.

The story is about Arno Penzias’s aunt Sussie. It is Germany, 1937. Arno Penzias’ aunt Sussie is riding on a streetcar in Berlin. A bunch of Gestapo agents board the streetcar and start asking for the passengers’ papers. Aunt Sussie starts to tremble. “What’s the matter?” asks the man who is sharing her seat. “I don’t have the same papers you do,” she said to him. “I’m a Jew.”

With that, the man started screaming at her: “You stupid, ugly, rotten, despicable good for nothing!!!” (and other words that I cannot mention here). A Gestapo agent walks over to them. “What’s all the commotion here?” “Oh, it’s my wife,” said the man. “I cannot believe what a moron she is!!! I keep on telling her to bring her papers with her when we leave the house, and she’s forgotten them. Really -- but sometimes women can be so forgetful, you know?” The Gestapo agent smiles… and just keeps walking on down the aisle.

At the next stop, the screaming man gets off the seat and gets off the streetcar.

Aunt Sussie never sees him again.

But because of him, she lived to a very old age. Because of him, she was able to tell that story.

Who gave that man his cue? Who told him to get on that streetcar at precisely that moment at precisely that place?

Mi yodea? Who knows? You never know. “As the heavens are high above the earth, so are My ways high above your ways, and My thoughts above yours.”

1 Lawrence Kushner, Invisible Lines of Connection: Sacred Stories of the Ordinary (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing), 1998.

Commercials for God

Yom Kippur morning

I don’t know about you, but the worst day of my summer was the day that I woke up and saw the following photograph on the front page of the New York Times.

It was the photograph of that infamous group in New Jersey – a group of 44 individuals that included various politicians and public officials – walking in handcuffs on their way to indictments for corruption charges.

But being a Jew, the first thing that I saw in that photograph was not the corrupt New Jersey politicians (which even long time residents of New Jersey admit is redundant). No – the first thing that caught my eye was the prominent placement in the photograph of several Orthodox rabbis – rabbis from the Syrian Jewish community in Deal, New Jersey – who were accused of corruption, and of money laundering, and of bribery, and of illegal trafficking in human organs.

Some of those men are the greatest sages of the Syrian Jewish community.

They are men of deep learning. They are men of great piety, or so it once seemed. And at that moment, I channeled my late grandmother and I said to myself: Oy. This is not good for the Jews. What will the gentiles say?

That was the worst day of a far better-than-usual summer. And again, I don’t know about you, but the worst day of my year was that day last December when I woke up to the news about Bernard Madoff.

You hardly need for me to re-state the sad and sordid and sickening story of

Bernard Madoff. His treachery came like a one-two punch on top of a fragile economy. In one single move, he decimated countless people’s lives, and he was even responsible for some people taking their own lives. It was a sobering midrash on the words of our liturgy: Who shall be rich and who shall be poor/Who shall be exalted and who shall be lowered?

I know of no one in this community who were among Madoff’s victims. But in reality, we were all Madoff’s victims. The damage and devastation that his massive betrayal caused to Jewish organizations is unspeakable. It has left many of the American Jewish community’s greatest projects in shambles. It has left many of the American Jewish community’s deepest dreams destroyed, cutting like a chain saw through numerous Jewish organizations, undoing decades of good work.

Please understand, as I know that you do: When Jewish organizations suffer, then American Judaism suffers. It injures our ability to advocate for who we are and what we need. The Madoff scandal was nothing less than a Jewish Katrina. This may have been the worst moment in American Jewish history. The years of his sentence are equal in number to the years of a mythical biblical life. They will barely serve as repentance. Because when Bernard Madoff finally dies in prison, and when he ascends for his final judgment, I hope that he will be ready for God’s first question, which is, according to the Talmud: Did you conduct your business with integrity?

And again, the ancient refrain: Oy. This is not good for the Jews. What will the gentiles say?

Now in my mind’s eye, I can see someone in the back of the room raising her hand and saying: Rabbi, what are you talking about? This is not about us. This is about them – a few bad people who just happen to be Jews. Why should we be embarrassed? What do they have to do with me, or with us? We didn’t do anything.

Well, I am certainly glad and relieved to hear that. But let’s do a little reality testing right now.

Please ask yourselves now if you felt deep pride – whatever your politics – when Senator Joseph Lieberman ran for vice-president….

Please ask yourselves now if you feel deep pride when a Jew wins a Nobel Prize…

Please ask yourselves now, if you are old enough to remember, if you were deeply proud of how, 44 years ago, Sandy Koufax (one of Madoff’s victims, by the way) refused to pitch in the World Series on Yom Kippur.

Please ask yourselves now if you feel a sense of pride that your favorite comedian or entertainer or writer is Jewish…

So this is what we need to know: If we are proud when Jews do good, then we have to shudder when Jews do bad.

Now some of you will say to me: Wait. That’s my grandmother’s way of thinking about the world. Jewish/non-Jewish. Good/bad.

My grandmother, you will say to yourselves, used to read the newspaper and go down the list of plane crash victims and say: Jewish. Not Jewish. My grandmother would point proudly at Jews who do great things and would turn away in embarrassment at Jews who do terrible things. She would use words like shanda! Rabbi, you will say – with all due respect, you’re talking like we’re still in the 1940s or 1950s. Rabbi, you need to download a new ideology.

And not only that, Rabbi, you will say – why do we Jews have to cringe when other Jews do something terrible? Episcopalians and Methodists and Baptists don’t walk around feeling neurotic when one of their co-religionists does something terrible. When the Enron scandal happened, do you really think that Episcopalian priests were sitting up late at night, working on sermons about “how could Episcopalians have done this?” So why are we Jews different?

Because we Jews are different.

It is because Judaism is a religion, but not only a religion. We are a religion that has a people and a people that has a religion.

That means that when the Jews feel joy, we feel joy.

When the Jews are embarrassed, we feel embarrassed.

When the Jews cry, we cry.

It means that we may be a small people, but we are a very large family. I want our children and our grandchildren to feel that and to be able to express that.

I would consider it a great loss if they didn’t feel that and if they couldn’t express that. I would consider Jewish education a great failure if they didn’t feel that and if they couldn’t express that.

You know what the Talmud says: All Jews are responsible for one another. The word for responsible is aravim, which means a mixture. We are all mixed up in each other. We are part of a sacred puree. We are all tied up with each other’s destiny.

You know what the Talmud teaches: Two men are sailing in a small boat. One man decides to bore a hole under his seat. The other man says: What are you doing? This boat is going to sink. To which the first man says: What do you care? I’m just drilling under my seat. You and I know that the Jewish people sails together on a very small and fragile boat and that what each of us does affects all Jews.

But wait a second, you are saying to yourselves. Something is wrong here. OK, Bernard Madoff was a secular Jew. But his henchman, Ezra Merkin, who is a major figure in the modern Orthodox community? Or the Syrian rabbis in Deal, New Jersey – deeply Orthodox Jews, all of them? Not to mention the fact that several prominent Israeli political figures, including former Prime Minster Ehud Olmert, are now under indictment?

They’re all Jewish. They all know Jewish sources and Jewish texts and they pray Jewish prayers. Why didn’t their Judaism influence their actions as well?

I will tell you why.

It is because of the great failure of contemporary Judaism. We keep two sets of file folders. One file folder is labeled: what happens here – in synagogue – on sacred days with sacred words. The other file folder is labeled: What happens there –in the real world – during the week.

We are not making the connections. A number of years ago, a black Baptist preacher said this: “A religion that ain’t no good on Monday ain’t no good on Sunday.” Or, on Saturday.

Think about that for a moment….

Don’t do this at home, but follow what I am saying: If you took a Hebrew Bible, and if you took a razor blade and cut out every passage in that Bible that has to do with the animals we’re supposed to eat and not eat … then your Bible would simply have a few holes in it.

If you took a razor blade and cut out everything about Shabbat, you would have a few holes. If you cut out every reference to bar mitzvah, then I have bad news for you. You got taken because it isn’t in there.

You know me well enough to know that I would never denigrate those items that we are theoretically cutting out. But… if you took that Bible… and if you cut out every verse that has to do with how we act in the marketplace… if you chopped out every teaching that has to do with economic justice…if you surgically removed every verse about how we treat the stranger, and the widow, and the orphan… if you eviscerated every verse that speaks of the distance between the rich and the poor…

You would be holding in your hand a book literally in tatters, a book that would have lost its bindings. You would have to say goodbye to the words of Isaiah in the haftarah this morning: “Why, when we fasted, did You not see? Because on your fast day you see to your business and oppress all your workers!”

If we were to sever out of Judaism everything that has to do with the ethics of the nine-to-five life, then our afternoon service today would be much shorter. Goodbye, Leviticus, chapter 19. We would have to say goodbye to the idea that there are moral bonds between people.

I once heard someone say: "The basis of all religion is 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' The basis of business is 'Suspect your neighbor as yourself.'” Is that really the world we want to live in?

Everyone here knows the words that were written over the gates of Auschwitz: Arbeit macht frei, work sets you free. This was the ultimate, cynical, horrendous motto of Planet Auschwitz. For the purpose of Auschwitz was to work people to death.

But do you know the words that were written over the gates of Buchenwald?

Very few people do. Here they are. Jedem das seine, "Every man for himself."

That is how the Nazis destroyed people in Buchenwald. It was by teaching that it’s every man for himself. It was the world that the late medieval philosopher Thomas Hobbes imagined: Every man is a wolf to every other man. Let every one devour each other alive.

Let me go but one step further. Actually, let me go back to my grandmother, and your grandmother, and the Jewish wisdom of grandmothers. My grandmother, and your grandmother, would look at Jews who do terrible things and wonder aloud: What will the gentiles say?

Forgive me, Nana. I loved you deeply but that was, alas, not the real question. Or it was not the best question. Perhaps it was left up to our generation to ask the real question. The real question is: What will God say?

Because here is a simple and profound truth: God is implicated in what we do. The term for that is hillul ha-shem. It means the desecration of God’s name. It’s on our list of sins for this morning. Al chet she-chatanu…for the sin that we have committed by desecrating God’s name.

Are you ready for this amazing paradox?

God is the most powerful being that we know, but even God is not all powerful.

There is one aspect of God over which we Jews have power. We have power over God’s reputation in the world!

When a Jew acts reprehensively, his or her actions not only reflect negatively on other Jews, but also on God. The term for this is hillul hashem, the desecration of God’s name – which was one of the sins that we mentioned today. What does it mean to commit a hillul ha-shem? The Talmudic Encyclopedia defines hillul ha-shem simply and elegantly: It is anything that causes gentiles to say, “The Jews don’t have a Torah.” So, yes. When publicly identifiable Jews, especially but certainly not limited to Orthodox Jews, defraud others and act unscrupulously, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Be very afraid not that gentiles will view such acts and say that they hate the Jews. No, it is far worse than that. Be very afraid that they will view such acts and they will conclude that the Jews, in fact, have no religion. The Talmud (Yoma 86a) teaches us that it is not enough for us to love God – we have to cause God to be loved in the world. We do that, it says, not by prayer and study and mitzvot alone, but through ethical behavior – particularly in the arena of business.

Because, the passage continues, if we fail in our ethical behavior and in the way that we treat people, it reflects badly on our teachers. It shows that Torah does not “work.”

To paraphrase my teacher Rabbi David Hartman, the pre-eminent modern Orthodox scholar of our time: The purpose of Jewish observance is for us to ask – What kind of person is supposed to emerge from this ritual behavior? A number of years ago, I was in Salt Lake City, Utah, with a friend. We visited all of the Mormon sites. We visited that hall where you can do research on your ancestors. I found my grandmother’s social security records. And then, we went into a theater where we watched a series of infomercials on Mormon values – infomercials that used to run on television late at night. As we were leaving the theater, I turned to my friend and said: We should have commercials for Judaism.

And this is what he said to me: I have some good news and some bad news.

I said to him: Give me the good news first. The good news? The good news is that we do have commercials for Judaism. And the bad news, I asked him. The bad news is that we are the commercials for Judaism.

Let’s face it – we are God’s PR department. This year, let’s try to live our lives as commercials for God.

Repairing the Tattered Scroll

Yizkor

When Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk died last week, the obituary in the New York Times contained these simple words in its headline: “Alfred Gottschalk, 79, Scholar of Reform Judaism, is Dead.” If Rabbi Gottschalk had only been a scholar of Reform Judaism, then we might say: Dayeinu – it is enough – for this and for this alone, we would be obligated to mourn him.

But Alfred Gottschalk was not only a scholar of Reform Judaism. Rabbi Gottschalk was the president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, which is the seminary that trains Reform rabbis, cantors, educators and communal professionals. In that sense, he was the rabbi to rabbis. Since 1971, he was the man who ordained every Reform rabbi. That included ordaining the first woman rabbi, the first gay and lesbian rabbis, and the first Reform rabbis in Israel.

Whether it was on the bima of Congregation Emanuel in New York City (which is where I was ordained) or on the bima of Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati (which is where Rabbi Friedmann was ordained), or at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, where Israeli rabbis are ordained: he would look each of us in the eye and he would ask each one of us if we were ready for the awesome responsibility of being a rabbi in Israel, a rabbi for the entire Jewish people.

Alfred Gottschalk was not my principle teacher. But we had a warm, affectionate, often humor-filled relationship over the years, especially when we would see each other on the streets in Jerusalem or at services there at the college.

But in a real sense, he became my teacher. Not in life, but in his death – or shall I say, a story that I first learned about him after he died. I invite you to learn from that story as well.

Rabbi Gottschalk grew up in the tiny German village of Oberwessel. The residents of Oberwessel revered the memory of a young Christian boy named Werner, who allegedly was murdered by Jews in the Middle Ages. In later years, Rabbi Gottschalk would remember that his childhood was essentially peaceful, except for the annual observance of Werner’s Day, when his friends would suddenly turn on him and beat him up, in memory of young Werner whom the Jews had supposedly murdered.

On November 9, 1938, Alfred Gottschalk was barely eight years old. That was Kristallnacht - the "night of broken glass.” That was the night when, all across Germany and Austria, Nazi thugs burned synagogues – among them the most beautiful synagogues in Europe. They destroyed Jewish homes and Jewish businesses, and they dragged off Jews by the thousands, many of whom disappeared forever.

In Oberwessel, it was slightly different. The rabble could not set the synagogue ablaze because it was too close to the homes of so-called “good Germans.”

So the Nazis tarred the building black, and they ransacked it for whatever they could find -- and then they tore up the Torah scrolls, and then they tossed the pieces of parchment into a creek.

The next morning, young Alfred Gottschalk and his grandfather waded into the creek. Together they pulled the saturated pieces of Torah parchment out of the water. And this is what Alfred’s grandfather said to him: “Some day,'' his grandfather told him, "Someday, you will put the scroll together again.”

And for the rest of his life, until two weeks ago when he died of injuries that he sustained in an automobile accident – that is precisely what Alfred Gottschalk did. He put the pieces of Torah back together again.

Let us leave Germany and travel to Holland, for a few moments. Before the Shoah, there were 140,000 Jews in Holland. 120,000 of them perished – including, of course, Anne Frank and her family, with the exception of her father (and we note that had she lived, Anne would have celebrated her eightieth birthday this past June). Before and during the war, Rabbi Jacob Soetendorp was the spiritual leader of the Liberal Jewish Congregation in Amsterdam (and again, let us note that the Frank family were members of that congregation). After the war, a stranger called upon Rabbi Soetendorp. In his hand, there was a package. When Rabbi Soetendorp unwrapped the package, he found a pile of objects that seemed to resemble the inner soles of shoes. These were not inner soles. No: in fact, it was a Torah scroll that a Nazi soldier had desecrated by cutting it into the shape of inner soles.

It turned out that the man who brought the package to Rabbi Soetendorp was the son of that Nazi soldier. He was bringing the scraps of Torah to Rabbi Soetendorp as an act of contrition and repentance. Jacob Soetendorp took those pieces of parchment, and he put those pieces of parchment into the Ark. He wanted those scraps of Torah in the ark. He wanted them there because he knew that they were still holy. He wanted them there because they were a testimony to a people’s will to live. He wanted them there because he must have known the teaching that when Moses shattered the tablets of the covenant in anger over the Golden Calf, that he put the pieces of the broken tablets into the same ark as the intact tablets – to remind us that the broken and the whole must journey together.

Perhaps he also knew this story – this story that we traditionally tell on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, when we recite the stories of the rabbis who died as martyrs during the worst time of Roman oppression – a story that long ago imprinted itself on my soul -- the story of Haninah ben Teradion, bound to the stake in a Torah scroll that a Roman soldier had perversely wrapped around him. The soldier took a torch to the scroll, and Haninah burned, and so did the scroll.

“Our master and rabbi,” his students cried, “What do you see?” To which he replied: “The scroll is burning; but the letters are returning to God Who gave them.” It was Haninah’s own tale of death and resurrection – the death and resurrection of the Jewish word.

And it came to pass that many years later, when Jacob Soetendorp died, his children decided to bury the scraps with him.

 I tell you these stories because, in a deep sense, I believe this to have been my life mission as well: to take the pieces of Torah that we have in the world and to put them together again. For me, the scraps of Torah that I have tried to put together are scraps of Torah that are left over from a generation that allowed secularism and apathy and assimilation to tear the Torah apart, piece by piece, until almost nothing was left of it.

The good news, the godly news, the redemptive news: We are of a generation that has both the will and the ability to put the Torah back together again.

And what of the scraps of scrolls that are not the Torah scroll, but another kind of scroll? What about the scraps of scrolls that are our own stories, our own personal stories? What about the scraps of scrolls that are our own lives, our own relationships? How do we sew those scraps back together again?

We took the scrolls out of the ark last night, and we held those scrolls. We took two scrolls out of the ark today, and we read from those scrolls. But there are other scrolls that are equally important. Each of us has an inner scroll. And today, we have been silently reading or chanting from that scroll as well.

We don’t like everything that is in the Torah scroll. But we revere it. And we don’t like everything that is in our inner scroll either. But we revere it.

There are paragraphs and chapters of that inner scroll that we don’t like. There are paragraphs and chapters that we wish some editor might have deleted. There are entire paragraphs and chapters that just don’t seem to make sense, that seem to not connect to the rest of our story. How could I have done that? We ask ourselves. Who was the person who did that? We ask as well.

And what have we been opening and reading and chanting during these moments of Yizkor? We have been opening and reading and chanting from the scrolls that were the lives of our loved ones. And there as well, we encounter paragraphs and chapters that we would rather not encounter as well. But we revere those scrolls, even with their imperfections and perhaps even with their scribal errors.

Years ago, I did a funeral for the mother of a woman in my congregation. It was not easy. This woman told me that she found it almost impossible to mourn for her mother. Her mother had been emotionally abusive for her entire life, and that abuse did not let up even until the very day of her death.

“How can I possibly mourn for her?” she asked me. I reminded her that we had chanted the 23rd Psalm at her mother’s funeral. Mizmor l’David – this was a psalm of David. David, who tradition teaches was the author of many of the Psalms. David, who was a poet and a musician and a king and a warrior – and a man who lost a son – and a murderer and an adulterer.

All of those things were David, I said to her. Which part of David was the ancestor of the Messiah, I asked her. “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps all of them?” Yes, all of them. All of them were the text that was David.

When he was dying, a great sage, Reb Yaakov, lay on a bed in the presence of his students. They asked him: “Reb Yaakov, what tractate of the Talmud will you study in heaven?" For as you may know, the Talmud consists of many different tractates; each tractate deals with a particular section of Jewish law and lore.

Much to the surprise of his students, Reb Yaakov did not respond with any of the known tractates of the Talmud. Rather, he said, "In heaven, I will spend all my time studying Tractate Reb Yaakov." I will spend eternity studying a special section of the Talmud that is about me, about what I have done, and about what I have taught. And I will spend eternity writing my own commentary in the margins of that section of Talmud.

And that is what it means for us to repair the tattered scroll of our lives. Of our lives, and of our loved ones’ lives. To write a commentary in the margins.