Three Ingredients for a Fuller Life

The holidays are over and, if you’re like me, you’ve done a fair amount of eating.  I want to offer a recipe that I shared with our congregation on Shemini Atzeret, right before the Yizkor service.  In deference to all the eating we’ve done, the recipe is not for food.  It’s a recipe for how we can live life more fully, a recipe that has been time-tested and tasted by the Jewish people.

Challenging Our Assumptions

Delivered on Kol Nidre Night 5773 at Temple Israel of Great Neck


I’ll start with a joke that many have heard, which I hope to use for a new purpose.  Robby tells the rabbi that he has a problem.  The World Series game is the same night as Kol Nidre.  The rabbi tells Robby he can TIVO it.  Robby says “Rabbi, you’re the best!  I didn’t know you can TIVO Kol Nidre.”

Tonight I want to talk about assumptions and how we need to challenge them.

First, a fact about an unfortunate recent event.  Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011.  This was within the past Jewish year, 5772, a fact which may or may not have been of interest to him, given that he spent much of his recent career arguing against the existence of God and denouncing religion for all of its negative contributions to the world.

Hitchens was an intelligent man with strong convictions.  He gave people of all religious backgrounds and perspectives a lot to think about.

Two years after he published God is Not Great:  How Religion Poisons Everything, Karen Armstrong wrote The Case for God. 

In The Case for God, Armstrong argued that the religion that Hitchens was attacking is fundamentalist religion.  Hitchens’ critique that religion claims a monopoly on truth is a critique of fundamentalist religion, as is his critique that religion is a source of bloodshed.

According to Karen Armstrong, Hitchens' attacks on religion assumed a fundamentalist approach to religion, and I tend to agree.  He set religion up as a straw man. 

Tonight, I’m going to ask us to do something that is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Yom Kippur as I understand it.  Yom Kippur is the day of reflection and purification. 

If ever there is a time for us to try to be honest with ourselves, to try to clean out the attic, intellectually and emotionally speaking, Yom Kippur is it. 

Tonight, I’m going to ask us to question our assumptions.  About God.  About one another.  And about ourselves. 

Speak Out, Act Out - Exerting Influence

A message for the New Year, delivered during the High Holy Days at Temple Israel of Great Neck

There’s a story told about a famous rabbi who became head of a yeshiva and author of several books.  His full name was Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin and he lived in Poland during the 19^th century.  He was known as the Netziv. 

But, of course, he wasn’t always famous.

In fact, when he was younger, he wasn’t a particularly good student.  The story told is that one evening, a year after his bar mitzvah, he overheard his parents talking in the kitchen and saying that because he wasn’t such a good student, maybe he should stop studying Torah so intensively and become a tailor.  The young man was confused. 

He went to sleep that night and had a dream.  In the dream, he saw himself at the end of his life, and then he passed on into the next world and he got to the front desk and he was asked a simple question.

Where are your books?

Excuse me?  He said.

You had the ability to write books about Jewish tradition and philosophy that would influence generations.

Where are they?

God's Love is for Everyone

Sometimes, I set out to say one thing and end up realizing I’d rather say something else.  That happened to me when I was preparing to speak for this morning.

I was set to talk about the evolution of our relationship with God and our religious tradition – the trajectory from the innocence of childhood to the rejection of teen hood to the accommodations and willed innocence of adulthood.
 

I was going to do my best not to oversimplify, to indicate that each phase has its nuances, and ultimately to come to what it means to be ach sameach – utterly joyful, during the festival of Sukkot – given the arc of our psychological and emotional development over time.

And then I opened up the New York Times and saw the cover article about a young man who is severely cognitively impaired, who is leaving the hospital where he spent his entire life and about to enter a group home.