Sermons, essays, articles, arguments and thought pieces from a Liberal Jewish perspective.
You can watch a recording of this sermon on our YouTube channel.
And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry, merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?
These haunting words by Leonard Cohen based on the ancient prayer Unetaneh Tokef, which we will be reciting in our morning service, remind us that at this High Holy Day season, when we celebrate the birth of the world, we are also invited to confront the inevitability of death.
This year, more than I have felt in any other year prior, death hovers over this season as we face the upcoming one year anniversary of 7 October while war continues to rage in Israel and Ukraine. I arrive at Rosh Hashanah unprepared to celebrate birth.
And yet, here we are at the cusp of the new year, recalling the miracle of the birth of the world to inspire us to reflect on the potential for our own re-birth: birth and death—two ends of a continuum, holding our life in equilibrium.
Throughout his career as a rabbi, Alan Lew often reflected about a Sunday morning the first summer when he was a rabbi in San Francisco when he received two phone calls within moments of each other. The first concerned a death that had just occurred on Twenty-seventh Avenue on the north side of Golden Gate Park, and the second concerned a birth that had just occurred on Twenty-seventh Avenue on the south side of the same park. He wrote about how he was struck by the coincidence of events—birth and death taking place at opposite ends of the same street at almost the same moment.i
But what truly moved me about the story was not Rabbi Lew’s reflections. Rather it was what the author Sherril Jaffe, Rabbi Lew’s wife, focused on when reflecting on the same story in her novel Interior Designs.ii She said:
These things are on the same continuum, but there is a park in between, a wild and beautiful place without streets and numbers. Flowers bloom there, and there are lakes where egrets wade. The cypresses are dark and cool. It is a beautiful place, as large and deep as a dream. But I hurry through there almost daily on my way to and from the places where the streets are numbered.
The philosopher Ernest Block observes in The Denial of Death, that we human beings seem to be the only creatures afflicted with the mysterious capacity to understand that we are going to die, and that it is precisely this fact that seems to call us to the world, to our life’s work, and to God.iii We try to compensate for this dread intelligence by constructing what Becker calls affirmation systems. We see the void and it terrifies us. So, we try to set up something in life that affirms our existence. As Rabbi Lew puts it:
Against death, which we see as the ultimate failure, we offer up success.
Against death, which we see as the ultimate emptiness, we offer up the acquisition of objects.
Against death, which we see as the end of all feeling, we offer up the pursuit of pleasure.
Against death, which we see as the final stillness, we offer up a ceaseless rage of activity.
Against death, which we see as the ultimate impotence, we offer up the glorification of our own power.
But in the process, we forget about the beautiful park that lies between the continuum from birth to death. Rather than living our lives, we rush through them. As Rabbi Lew warns: “Our problem isn’t that we don’t try hard enough. It is that we try too hard.”
As we race through our lives, we start feeling like the batteries of our slightly outdated phones that seem to be depleted just moments after they had been recharged. But the Jewish tradition teaches us that we are not supposed to be like phone batteries, in a perpetual cycle of charging and re-charging. Rather, the Torah reminds us that the most sacred moments require a stepping away from this cycle of charging and re-charging.
To be able to hear God calling, as Leonard Cohen asks of us, we have to stop, to step away, to give ourselves the opportunity to be present. Just think of the moment when Moses encounters God from the Burning Bush. Or the Israelites wandering through the wilderness in preparation for receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai.
Last year, I was given the immense privilege of a sabbatical from my congregational work. The greatest gift of those months was the gift of stillness – of not having to live to a schedule, not being bound by a feeling of always being behind with a task that needs to be completed, emails that need to be answered, calls that must be returned.
My sabbatical reminded me of the great privilege of being able to stop and appreciate the moment, enjoy the beauty of nature, appreciate the birdsong, immerse myself in a book, be present for my family and friends and simply lose the sense of time. It allowed me to hear God’s call, to pay attention to the holiness around me and to see ever more clearly the many places where holiness is still desperately lacking.
The first time that the Bible talks about holiness, kadosh, is at the end of the creation story when God, exhausted from the work of creation, having taken a deep breath that gives life to humanity, simply stops, refreshing the soul – shavat vayinafash. Kadosh, holiness, accompanies us through the liturgy of these High and Holy Days. But kadosh, holiness, is not something that should be restricted to special days in the calendar, rather, as Rabbi Lew reminds us, “kadosh fills the Torah, and the imperative of the Torah is that we fill the world with holiness as well.”
As we look at our broken world, the idea that we can fill the world with holiness seems almost preposterous. But this is exactly what the Jewish tradition teaches. Judaism teaches that life is more powerful than theatre, which the theatre scholar Professor Jill Dolan describes in Utopia in Performance as, at best, providing a momentary glimpse of a better world that it has no power to achieve.
Judaism calls on us to focus on a vision for a better world because it holds that we have the power to achieve it. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead famously put it: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
We might not be able to bring about an immediate end to all wars, to facilitate the release of the hostages, to eliminate poverty, to heal the sick, to bring reconciliation to estranged families or to save nature from man-made destruction. But we each have the power to stop, to listen to God calling and to bring holiness into this world one little gesture at a time.
As the American Jewish fundraiser and poet Danny Segal describesiv:
If you always assume the one sitting next to you is the Messiah waiting for some simple human kindness, you will soon come to weigh your words and watch your hands. And if the Messiah chooses not to be revealed in your time – It will not matter.
It is in these simple acts of bringing holiness to this world that we can find a powerful sense of hope and a deep connection to God. When we pray for forgiveness on Rosh Hashanah, we do so not on the basis of our merits, which we realize are woefully inadequate, but on the strength of that connection.
At the cusp of a new year, let us pray in the words of Rabbi Harold M. Schulweisv:
The last word has not been spoken
the last sentence has not been written
the final verdict is not in
It’s never too late
to change my mind
my direction
to say “no” to the past
and “yes” to the future
to offer remorse
to ask and give forgiveness
It is never too late
to start all over again
to feel again
to love again
to hope again
And so, as we have done when we lit our candles, we unite with Jews around the world to proclaim a new year of hope. As we embrace the task that lies ahead, as we prepare to fill the world with holiness, let us take the time during these High and Holy Days to stop and listen. As we enter the new year, let us focus on the simple question: Can you hear God calling?
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[i] Lew, Alan. This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation (pp. 116-117). Little, Brown and Company 2003. Kindle Edition.
[ii] Jaffe, Sherril. Interior Designs. Black Sparrow Press 1996. As quoted in Lew, Alan. This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation (pp. 117). Little, Brown and Company 2003. Kindle Edition.
[iii] As quoted in Lew, Alan. This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation (pp. 118-119). Little, Brown and Company 2003. Kindle Edition.
[iv] As quoted in Goldstein, Andrew and Middleburgh, Charles. The High & Holy Days – A book of Jewish Wisdom (p. 26). Canterbury Press 2010.
[v] Schulweis, Harold. In God’s Mirror (pp296-297), K’tav 1990.
