High Holiday Sermons 2023

 

Rosh Hashana Day 1 and 2  - YouTube Links

You can hear Rabbi Goldstein's sermon for Rosh Hashanah Day 1 on video here: 

Day 1 - click HERE

Day 2 - no video link, text is below

 

 

Kol Nidre, Yom Kippur  - YouTube Links

You can hear Rabbi Goldstein's sermons on video here: 

Kol Nidre - click HERE                 

Yom Kippur - click HERE               

 

 

Kol Nidre 

 

There is a story about King Solomon who once tested his minister by asking him to bring him a special ring. “What kind of ring,” asked the minister. “One that contains all the wisdom in the world,” answered the king. The minister searched high and low for such a ring but could not find one. One day he was walking through the market when he saw a jewelry merchant and asked the merchant, “Can you make a ring that contains all the wisdom in the world?” The merchant smiled and said “of course I can.” He took a small gold ring, engraved it with 3 Hebrew letters, and handed it to the minister. When King Solomon next saw the minister, the minister said, “Here it is, your majesty,” and gave the king the ring. At that moment King Solomon knew that the wisdom of the entire world was inscribed in that ring. Inscribed on it were three letters: gimmel, zayin, and yud, which stand for “Gam zeh ya’avor – this too shall pass.” Gam zeh ya’avor”— the words that make the sad happy, and the happy sad. The words which are always true, no matter where, no matter when, no matter who.

Those three letters are inscribed on this little pinky ring I never take off, worn by my sister Marsha and never taken off by her until she passed away suddenly at the age of 45. She lived this mantra with all her heart—she knew that all the painful and difficult moments will one day pass, and so will the joyous ones.

Gam zeh ya’avor, this too shall pass: these words of hope and possibility and stark reality helped many of us get through the most difficult days of the pandemic.

Gam zeh ya’avor: change is the vital lesson that life gives us every day. All things change. You never step into the same river twice. You are never the same even if you go to the same place year after year.  Children leave the house and start their own lives. Parents grow older.  Friends move in together and other friends drift away, kitchens get renovated and jobs get startedvor finished and parents become grandparents and cottages get sold and camp friends go to university. Those who are well become ill and those who are ill become well (hopefully) and marriages start and marriages dissolve and your founding Rabbi retires…and nothing stays the same. Laws change. Customs change.  Organizations change. Countries change. I started doing high holiday sermons the year before my son Micah was born and now he is getting married. Night becomes day and day becomes night.  Our lives go up and our lives go down and we have no way to prepare. It is not a choice. It is the painful, exhilarating, frightening, growthful truth of living.

On our sabbatical travels many years ago, we were transfixed in China by an elderly gentleman painting what seemed like an endless text in Chinese characters on the sidewalk with a giant brush in water. By the end of the block, his first words were slowly disappearing as he continued his mission.  Sentence after sentence made with water disappeared, and yet he continued to write.

Buddhist monks create mandalas in the sand and then, in an elaborate ceremony, dissolve and dismantle them by sweeping up the sand painting and delivering it into the sea, in an honouring of impermanence.

Or as comedian George Carlin quipped: “Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it.”

Yehuda Amichai, Israel’s most celebrated poet who died in 2000, wrote a poem called The Eleventh and Twelfth Commandments:

“And my father’s voice was white like the hair on his head.
Later, he turned his face to me one last time
like on the day he died in my arms and said, I want to add
two to the ten commandments:
The eleventh commandment: “Don’t change.”
And the twelfth commandment: “You must surely change.”

We live between the eleventh and twelfth commandment; the desire to never change and the reality of constant change. We are always learning to navigate and steer a course between the two. And as we steer, we hopefully acquire a new skill and a new perspective to carry us though the transition. The Reverend Ted Bolsinger calls this new skill  “canoeing the mountains” and he explains it with this story:  In the early 1800’s explorers Lewis and Clark set out to find a way west to the Pacific. They assumed they would find a water route, so they brought canoes. Instead they found themselves in the mountains. They had planned to row their way there. Now what? They were fortunate to have an Indigenous guide named Sacajawea who helped them trade their canoes for mountain gear. The expedition was not over, but it was changed. We too may have to trade canoes for mountain gear, and also learn, if necessary, how to canoe the mountains.

Now we can resist this and refuse to believe there is a mountain where the river used to be. We can pine away for “the good ole days” like the joke “how many boomers does it take to change a lightbulb? None, they just keep talking about how great the old one was” and we can deal with the devil we know rather than the devil we don’t know to avoid anxiety about an unseen future. But true resilience is gained by trading the canoe for mountain gear, or by learning how to canoe a mountain.

The Unetaneh Tokef prayer drives this message home. As Rabbi Alan Lew writes, “This year, some will die, some will live, but all will change”. It is the wisdom of King Solomon’s ring to contemplate not what changes the new year will inevitably bring, but to contemplate how we will meet them, how we will greet them, how we will navigate them, and how we will live with them. 

And of only one thing can we be certain: that there is not much we can be certain of.

We humans are not well designed, it seems, to live in this constant state of uncertainty.  In an article in the Harvard Business review in 2021, titled “Our Brains Were Not Built for This Much Uncertainty” researchers Heidi Grant and Tal Goldhamer wrote in the midst of the pandemic: “For most of human history, we have been hunter-gatherers, living in groups where individuals had established roles and lives. While sometimes dangerous, life was largely predictable. The brain evolved to be remarkably good at recognizing patterns and building habits, turning very complex sets of behaviors into something we can do on autopilot. (Ever drive home from work and end up in your driveway, with no memory of actually driving home? That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about.) Given that habits and recognizable patterns are kind of its “thing,” the brain evolved to be uncertainty-averse…”

While there certainly are “adventure seekers” who seek out novel (and often) dangerous experiences, most of us sit in the same place when we enter a classroom or a sanctuary; we make the same foods on a holiday, we go away with the same people, often to the same place. It’s comforting and part of the brains strategy to making sense and even prepare for an inevitable or sudden change that may come our way: someone else is siting in our seat! It’s human nature to want to go back to where everything is familiar, predictable, and recognizable even if that’s a more uncomfortable or dangerous place. Think about the four-fifths of the Israelites who resisted the change taking placing in Egypt, and stayed enslaved rather than join their compatriots marching into the unknown.

The world in front of us will be nothing like the world behind us.

Our Israelite ancestors knew that. Our Israelite forbears knew that the only way to get to redemption was a long walk to an unseen desert mountain and a new way of life no former slave could yet imagine. The world in front of them at Sinai was nothing like the word they left behind in Egypt.

And the Rabbis of the second century knew that when they left behind the Temple in Jerusalem and did not close up shop but instead asked how to canoe the mountain, and wrote the Talmud as an answer. We traded priests for prayerbooks and sacrifices for synagogues. We have been the ever-changing people who have worshiped an ever-changing God from the very beginning, the One whose name is Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh – “I Will Be What I Will Be.” God’s own essence is imagined as continually in process. Imitatio Dei: we are supposed to emulate God.— whose very name defies staying static. The core of Jewish history is lech-lecha: go to a land that I will eventually show you. Have faith and trust in a future you cannot see.

Of course we are anxious when we live in that lech-lecha moment, in-between time, the liminal moment between the old year not yet gone and the new year not yet born, the time that the late anthropologist Victor Turner termed “between no longer and not yet.”

The time between no longer and not yet is the new relationship you are starting, the move from one home to another or from Toronto to another city, the new job you hope to land, the surgery you are waiting for. It can be the most exciting time of your life, and the most terrifying, both equally. The time between no longer and not yet tests your inner strength and tugs at your memory and tantalizes you with possibility. It will also bring loss. And it will bring disappointment.

What will we do this year with the losses and disappointments which come from change? What will we do with our anticipatory loss about the changes that this congregation will experience?

What will we do with our disappointment in our beloved Israel as it teeters dangerously close to internal crisis and hovers between a utopian vision and a dystopian society and its changes that are alienating and dangerous? We cannot live in the past and we cannot love the past so much it strangles the future. Comedian Lily Tomlin once said, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having a better past.” We cannot change the past. Kol Nidre is written in the future tense, asking forgiveness for what we may yet do this coming year.

We cannot change that we are mortal and therefore make mistakes. We cannot change that we will not live forever though there are people who look to religion for an exception to this law. And we cannot change another person—not our partners, not our children, not our parents and not our friends. We can only change ourselves and then, in our imagination we can design the person we desire to become. Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Aish Kodesh, taught “teshuvah is our return to the person we have not yet been.”

So how will we do it? Actress Amy Poehler wrote, “Our ability to navigate and tolerate change and its painful uncomfortableness directly correlates to our happiness and well-being.” How will we navigate and tolerate change this year, in our personal lives, in our family lives, in our communal synagogue life; in our lives as Jews connected to Israel and connected to the Diaspora and connected to each other?

First, by not resisting the truth of gam zeh ya’avor. At the end of this past August, Brad Stulberg, the author of the book “Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing — Including You” wrote a guest essay in the New York Times called “Stop Resisting Change.” He begins, “…so many people have fraught relationships with change. We deny it, resist it or attempt to control it — the result of which is almost always some combination of stress, anxiety, burnout and exhaustion. It doesn’t have to be that way.”  He goes on to counsel that we “shift our default position from futile resistance to being in conversation with change.” Rather than being rigid, our healthy baseline should become a moving target. Homeostasis says healthy systems return to the same starting point following a change: X to Y back to X. But in contrast, he teaches allostasis, in which that stability turns out to be somewhere new: X to Y to Z.

Stuhlberg contends that the way to stay stable through the process of change is by changing. In other words, as he says, "If you want to hold your footing, you’ve got to keep moving.”

Second, we can learn from what Franciscan priest Richard Rohr has coined the “Wisdom Pattern”— order, disorder, reorder. That pattern, he says, is the growing pain of how we mature; the life-cycle of spiritual development. Order, disorder, reorder. Every healthy organization goers through this and every healthy family too. After disorder, there is no going back to the way things were — no one form of order, but rather, many forms of reorder. The world in front of us nothing like the world behind us.

Third, we can focus on what we ​can ​be sure of. Yes, death and taxes. But we can be sure of the moment we are in. We can be fully present in the now. In the month of Elul we recited Psalm 27 every day. I was always struck by verse 3:

בְּ֝זֹ֗את אֲנִ֣י בוֹטֵֽחַ׃

“In this I am secure.” What is the “this”? Only this moment; that is all I know and so I live it fully. Yes there is anxiety around me for what comes next; yes there is uncertainty and that brings anticipatory grief—maybe things won’t work out! Maybe things will get worse! בְּ֝זֹ֗את אֲנִ֣י בוֹטֵֽחַ׃—only in the now can I be sure, and so, I will.

And fourth, we can practice compassion. Compassion for ourselves and compassion for others as we strive to understand that all of us are going through some kind of transition at some point in our lives. You all know the quote attributed to Robin Williams, “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.” Maybe it’s not exactly a battle but everyone is carrying something that is going on in their lives. We meet them and ourselves with patience, with forgiveness, acceptance, and love.

Gam zeh ya’avor: The Unetaneh Tokef prayer ends with paths toward reordering:  teshuva, tefila, and tzedakah—repentance, prayer, and charity. Rabbi Cheryl Weiner wrote, "When we find ourselves wandering and lost, teshuvah — turning and returning — has the power to reorient us… When change throws us off balance, tefillah helps us to regain our footing… When our hands curl inward to protect ourselves…tzedakah forces us to open our hands…”

Teshuva reminds us we can turn around and therefore we are not stagnant. Tefillah reminds us we can reach out to something Higher and therefore we are not alone. And tzedakah reminds us that we can remake the present and therefore approach the future with confidence.

The Hebrew word for “year”, shanah, shares its root letters with the Hebrew word for “change”, shinui, and the Hebrew word for “different”, shoneh. Each time we wish one another shanah tovah, we are wishing one another a good change. As the Brits say “well over the fast” perhaps we should be wishing one another “well over all the changes that will happen in all our lives this coming new year.” Gam zeh ya’avor: we actually all wear this ring though in different ways.

So God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

G’mr Chatimah Tova. Shana Tova.

 

Yom Kippur 

What’s the difference between Brits and Jews? Brits leave without saying goodbye and Jews say goodbye without leaving.

I grew up with a mother who was always the last at the temple Friday night Oneg Shabbat, and maybe you did too.

It’s called “the Jewish goodbye.” We pick up another cookie, say goodbye, schmooze a little more, make future plans, say goodbye, call over another friend who is just leaving, catch up, say goodbye, take another cookie…you get the picture. On the final season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David introduced “The Big Goodbye” — he would dodge a person for an entire evening and then make a grand parting gesture to them as he was leaving. You might be a member of the tribe, Dovidel, but this is not the way it’s done outside the Hollywood shtetl. The amount of time for a Jewish goodbye increases exponentially the more Jews try to leave.

Elissa Strauss wrote this beautiful analysis of the Jewish goodbye in The Forward: “there is no awkward small talk or vague vows to meet again, and it doesn’t end with the conversation fizzling out and us shuffling apart. Instead, we rush to learn just a little more from one another, to tell each other how lovely it was to see their face and how we really wish it could happen more often. The duration of the goodbye is directly connected to the feeling of genuine affection between the parties parting—the longer it lasts the more we are blissing out on the magic of human connection.”

How much we missed that bliss of human connection over the pandemic years and how much longer now our goodbyes are because of that.

 

he Talmud in Berachot 31a tells us to say farewell with words of Torah, teaching the person you are leaving something new, to ensure that the friendship is remembered.

וְכֵן תְּנָא מָרִי בַּר בְּרֵיהּ דְּרַב הוּנָא בְּרֵיהּ דְּרַבִּי יִרְמְיָה בַּר אַבָּא: אַל יִפָּטֵר אָדָם מֵחֲבֵירוֹ אֶלָּא מִתּוֹךְ דְּבַר הֲלָכָה, שֶׁמִּתּוֹךְ כָּךְ זוֹכְרֵהוּ.

“And so Mari, the grandson of Rav Huna, son of Rabbi Yirmeya bar Abba, taught in a baraita: One should only take leave of another when discussing a matter of halakha, so that, consequently, you will remember them…” ; the commentary Eliyahu Zuta adds: “whenever you recall the one from whom you took leave, you will think fondly of them because of the new thing that they taught you.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says the origins of the word goodbye is actually a contraction of “God be with you.” Imagine if when we finally did say our goodbyes, we ended them with a blessing.

Once again the Talmud guides us. In Berachot 64a we read:

וְאָמַר רַבִּי אָבִין הַלֵּוִי: הַנִּפְטָר מֵחֲבֵרוֹ אַל יֹאמַר לוֹ ״לֵךְ בְּשָׁלוֹם״, אֶלָּא ״לֵךְ לְשָׁלוֹם״, שֶׁהֲרֵי יִתְרוֹ שֶׁאָמַר לוֹ לְמֹשֶׁה ״לֵךְ לְשָׁלוֹם״.

Rabbi Avin HaLevi said: One who takes leave from another should not say to them: Go in peace, but rather: Go to peace.

Go towards peace. May peace be the direction of your life, till we meet again.

That’s why I love the modern Hebrew l’hitraot- see you again. But it's pretty much been replaced by “Nu - Yalla - bye” a quickie slang made up of no Hebrew—a Yiddish Arabic English portmanteau–and sadly it short-changes us of the promise that we will still “bliss out on the magic of human connection” together one day.

We even say l’hitraot when we complete the study of a sacred text. At a siyum, a conclusion ceremony when one finishes studying an entire tractate of Talmud, there is a prayer which goes: Hadran alakh Masekhet _____…We will return to you, O Tractate ____ [fill in the name of the tractate], and you will return to us; our mind is on you, Tractate ____, and your mind is on us; we will not forget you, Tractate ____, and you will not forget us – not in this world and not in the next world.

Of course I’ve been thinking about how one says goodbye these days. This summer I read a small book by Dr. Ira Byock, a doctor in palliative care, called The Four Things That Matter Most with a subtitle “A Book about Living.” In it he summarizes a lifetime of working with dying patients, teaching their families to say a good goodbye.

While his book is focused on deathbed goodbyes, what he teaches is deeply relevant and I think will resonate with all of us on Yom Kippur. Because in our lives there is always something that brings with it the need to say a meaningful goodbye. Your kids go off to college, or you leave a job, or your friend moves away. Camp ends or you graduate from university and the temporary communities you’ve built slowly dissipate and often without closure. You move to a new city or move out of your parents home or … you retire. There are the goodbyes that you choose to make. And there are the goodbyes that are thrust upon you. Either way, these Four Things, he teaches, make for a good goodbye.

The Four Things are:

Please forgive me

I forgive you

Thank you

I love you

 

11 words. 11 in gematria equals chag, or holy day. Today. 11 words. Byock calls this “stating the obvious.”

There is a traditional Hawaiian practice of repeating the mantra, ““I’M SORRY, PLEASE FORGIVE ME, THANK YOU, I LOVE YOU” called “Ho’oponopono” which translates into English as “making things right”, and like the verbal confession we make three times over Yom Kippur—one during Kol Nidre, one this morning, and one again at Neilah—there is so much power in the spoken word, in stating the obvious, in the mantra of remorse, forgiveness, gratitude and love. The special haftarah for Shabbat Shuva, the Shabbat between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, has the prophet Hosea saying to us:

קְח֤וּ עִמָּכֶם֙ דְּבָרִ֔ים וְשׁ֖וּבוּ אֶל־יְהֹוָ֑ה

Take words with you on your return to Gd.

11 words, is all we need, to return to each other and to return to a spiritual grounding and centredness.

Please forgive me. To ask for forgiveness is to stand at your most embarrassing and most vulnerable. You must broach the barrier of “assumed impossibility”— you are sure they won’t forgive you, or they won’t want to have the conversation. To ask for forgiveness is to accept and admit that you are imperfect and still trying and so then is the person you have wronged. Human to human, across pride and anger and old grudges, with the words “please forgive me”, we change our relationship not only with the party we have wronged, but with ourselves.

I forgive you. Forgiveness is not exoneration. The transgression still happened —it’s just that we no longer live in it. The Rambam, Maimonides teaches in Hilchot Teshuva, the Laws of Repentance,  that we must ask for forgiveness three times, and then, if the person we’ve asked does not forgive us, the sin is on them—the sin of hardheartedness, the sin of not forgiving. With the words “I forgive you” we lighten our own burden.

Thank you. If the only prayer we ever say is Modim, that is enough. Thanking someone is an act of generosity. We know that expressing gratitude improves one-on-one relationships, but a new study by Sara Algoe of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that even witnessing gratitude affects people’s feelings toward the grateful person and the recipient of the thanks. You know firsthand how special it is just to hear the Modims of congregants each Shabbat. With the words “thank you” we create a ripple effect that can actually change an entire social system. We loved reading the children’s book Because Brian Hugged His Mother with our kids; it tells the story of how just that one hug Brian gave his mom that one morning caused a chain reaction of human kindness all day long.

And, finally, I love you. Rabbi Dow Murmur of blessed memory once told me about a funeral where the husband is so distraught he almost throws himself on the casket. Rabbi Murmur tried to calm the man down but the man turns to him crying and says “you don’t understand Rabbi! I loved her so much I almost told her!” Saying I love you also shows our vulnerability—what if your loved one doesn’t say it back? I know we are all into the “5 love languages” of author Gary Chapman—and there is much to be said for the other 4— quality time, gifts, acts of service and physical touch—but what he calls “words of affirmation” or the simple phrase “I love you” can, as the prophet Hosea suggested, bring us back on a return not only to a friend or a love one but to a more centred and aligned relationship with just about everyone else.

Dr. Byock concludes his book with this statement: “It is always too soon until it’s too late."

With that in mind, on this holiest day of the day, although it feels too soon for me to get personal, please allow me. Although this is not my last sermon—I am very much still here and I am very much still at City Shul until June and I will give many other sermons and divrei Torah and I look forward to many personal conversations with you throughout this year— still I feel the weight of this moment, of this our last Yom Kippur together as your rabbi and my congregation.

And so, I want to say these four things to you because although we will have a “good goodbye” together in June, as Dr. Byock said, “it is never too soon”.

So, dear friends:

Please forgive me. Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky in a book called Leadership on the Line wrote, “Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb.” I’m sorry for the times when I was abrupt, or impatient. Forgive me for the times I forgot to ask how you are before asking you to do something. For the times I didn’t visit you when you were ill. For the times I messed up and gave away your honour. For the times I dismissed your concerns or misunderstood why you wanted something so badly. Forgive me for the times I was rigid and the times my standards hurt you.

And I forgive you. I forgive those who had beautiful life cycle events and then left the synagogue saying “thanks, but we don’t need you anymore.” I forgive you for not always remembering that my job does not include tech support and air conditioning and kitchen logistics and where you left your book. I forgive you for telling me about anonymous critics— “people are saying”. And I forgive those who need me— and my while family— to be on a pedestal at all times, because we just can’t.

And Thank you. For being part of the most wonderful experiment that worked. For catching me when I jumped off the cliff 13 years ago and said “hey, wanna start a shul?” Thank you for trusting me to bury your loved ones and name your babies and push your 13 year olds hard and make them come to shul enough to be a real part of a real community. And thank you for staying after that important day to attest that a synagogue is more than a BMitzvah factory. Thank you for not being overly critical when my sermon wasn’t such a home-run. Thank you most of all for letting me “rabbi”, for allowing me the privilege of being the marah d’atrah, the religious authority who knows enough to make the hard Jewish religious decisions. Thank you for being the kind of synagogue that makes other Rabbis jealous.

And yes, finally—I love you. I love every one of you equally, but some more than others (just kidding.) On Rosh Hashana I introduced you to my homiletics professor (homiletics: the art of preaching) Rabbi Lenny Kravitz (not the singer, again) who had many aphorisms that have stayed with me throughout my career. Here is one more: “If you’re going to be a Rabbi, you have to love Jews as much as you love Judaism, and that’s not easy.” I love loud pushy Jews (after all, I am one from New York) and I love all the non-Jewish partners who support them in their Jewish journeys. I love the non-Jews who chose to become Jewish and take the rigorous process seriously and then comfortably take their seats at the table of Jewish identity. I love those just putting one toe into shul life or Jewish study and those who dive in head first, the ones who walk in line day and the next day are head ushers! I love the seekers and non-believers and skeptics who come anyway and I love those who, like Jacob in Genesis 28, found Gd was in this place and did not know it:

אָכֵן֙ יֵ֣שׁ יְהֹוָ֔ה בַּמָּק֖וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה וְאָנֹכִ֖י לֹ֥א יָדָֽעְתִּי׃

I love the diehard Conservative Jews who joined a Reform synagogue. I love all of you who came with me to Israel and Jewish India and China and South Africa and let me teach Torah through travel, and by the way I intend to continue leading trips and will always invite you to come on them. I love you and all the people like you who have been the reason I have loved being a Rabbi  for 40 years and I will continue to love it for the rest of my life.

11 words. Stating the obvious. “Ho’oponopono”. Making things right. קְח֤וּ עִמָּכֶם֙ דְּבָרִ֔ים וְשׁ֖וּבוּ אֶל־יְהֹוָ֑ה

Taking words with us on our return.

Please forgive me

I forgive you

Thank you

I love you

Yom Kippur is the time to adopt the four things that matter most as this year’s goal. As Rabbi David Wolpe said, “…the point of Yom Kippur is to remind you as forcefully as possible that you don’t have forever.” This day challenges us to remember— we still have time to do something about our lives. There is never too soon. There is only too late.

May we strive to say these things which matter most to those who matter most; those still with us in this world and even those still with us but in the next world. קְח֤וּ עִמָּכֶם֙ דְּבָרִ֔ים וְשׁ֖וּבוּ אֶל־יְהֹוָ֑ה

May we take these words with us on our return this year. And may the world be full of words of forgiveness, gratefulness, and love. And then, may we will all go towards peace.

Shana Tova, Gmar Chatimah Tova