Stop Keeping Score With Others - a Message for Yom Kippur

The home I grew up in was a cape cod house on a tree-lined street in New Jersey.  I didn’t think it was small growing up, I didn’t think it was large.  I do remember, though, that my mother thought the kitchen was a bit on the small side - specifically, that it didn’t have enough counter space, as she would occasionally tell my father.  

One day we were visiting with my aunt and uncle who lived in a larger house on the other side of town that had a larger kitchen to begin with and my aunt wanted to show my mother that the kitchen had been redone.  The kitchen was even more spacious than it had been, with two ovens and lots of counter space. 

My mother ooh-ed and aah-ed at all the appropriate moments, my aunt served a lovely meal, my mother wished my aunt Mazel Tov on her renovated kitchen and said “use it well.” And then we got in the car to drive back to our side of town.  My mother said nothing to my father in the ride home but he had a sense of what she was thinking.

A week later, a week during which my mother didn’t once mention my aunt’s upgraded kitchen, she was cooking steaks for dinner.  She pulled the tray with the perfectly cooked steaks out of the oven, balanced the tray on the small counter and, as it turned out, the tray toppled over and landed face down on the floor, every single steak upside down and marinating in whatever had been used the day before to clean the floor.

That evening I heard a few words that I didn’t know my mother knew.  And a few days later my parents started to renovate the kitchen.

On arguably the holiest day of the year, I want to talk about keeping score with other people.  I think we all do it.  We compare ourselves to other people, our houses to their houses, our kitchens to their kitchens, our lives to their lives.

We compare our accomplishments, our appearance, our relative fortune and misfortune to the accomplishments, appearance, fortunes and misfortunes of others.

We keep score when it comes to what we get and we keep score when it comes to what we give.

That would be just fine.  Except that often it makes us miserable to keep score with others. 

Try Again - a Message for the New Year

What we’ve gotten wrong in the past, we can get right today.   We have the ability, and the responsibility, to try again.

There’s an excellent TV show about two brothers and a sister called “This Is Us.”  It goes back and forth between the three of them as children and as adults.  

I want to share a beautiful scene from the show that has to do with the two brothers.  One of the brothers, named Randall, has a history of panic attacks.  As a child and as a teen, he would get overwhelmed by all of the stress in his life, freeze in place, and not be able to function.  His brother, Kevin, was busy with his own stuff and didn’t offer much support to Randall while they were growing up.

So here’s the scene.  They’re adults now.  Kevin is an actor and it’s his opening night and he’s about to go onstage.  He’s in the dressing room, feeling excited and anxious, when his cell phone rings.  It’s Randall.  He tells Kevin he is still working at the office and won’t be able to make it to opening night.  He doesn’t quite sound like himself, he says things that don’t make sense. Kevin is taken aback and realizes that his brother is probably in trouble.  

Kevin wonders what to do.  He is backstage, about to go on, and struggling with what he should do, wondering what his father would do in that situation.  The show starts.  Kevin’s costar steps out onto the stage, turns to speak to him, and he isn’t there.  He has left the theater and is running toward his brother’s office.  

While he’s running, we see a flashback to when the brothers were young teens at home.  Randall is sitting in a chair, in a full panic attack.  Kevin walks by his room and sees him rocking back and forth in his chair, practically in tears.  Kevin pauses and then continues to walk right by. 

Back to the present, Kevin arrives at Randall’s office.  He sees Randall crouched in the corner, unable to move, paralyzed by anxiety.  He sits next to his brother, hugs him tight, and his brother just cries in his arms.  Finally, as an adult, Kevin does what he didn’t do earlier in his life for whatever reasons. Finally he gets it right.

If someone were to ask me, what is the most important message of this holiday?  I would say the message is as follows:  when we have messed up in the past, we can TRY AGAIN.  We can try, this time, to get it right.  And in many situations we MUST try, this time, to get it right.  It’s basic. But it’s not easy.  

Entering the Gates Together

A few weeks ago, a group of young, enthusiastic Jews arrived in Israel on a birthright trip.  They landed, got their bags, and walked through the doors of the arrival area in Ben Gurion airport.  They started dancing and singing עם ישראל חי am yisra’el chai.  

Jews from the Abayudaya community reading Torah at the Kotel

Nothing unusual, except that all of the participants are black and come from Uganda.  This was the first Birthright trip for the Jewish community of Uganda known as Abayudaha, the Lugandan word for “people of Judah.”

The Abayudaya began their history over a century ago when a leader of a small community adopted Jewish practices. Over the next decades the group adopted more and more Jewish practices  In the early 2000’s, approximately 400 individuals went through the conversion process under Conservative/Masorti auspices and more did so during subsequent years.  In 2015, several of the inhabitants of one of the villages were converted by (Orthodox) Rabbi Shlomo Riskin.

Today there are over 2000 members of the community.  Their spiritual leader is Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, who received his ordination at the Ziegler Rabbinical School of American Jewish University.

Recently Israel’s Interior Ministry, based on a ruling of the Chief Rabbinate, determined that the Abuyadaya were not to be considered Jewish for the purpose of immigration and a member of the community was recently denied a visa for the purpose of studying in Jerusalem.  

Rabbi Andrew Sacks, a Masorti Rabbi who has worked with the Abuyadaya, said the following about the Interior Ministry’s decision: