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.
At a certain point in our lives we may have done the wrong thing, or not done the right thing, for whatever reasons.
We may not have been there for people who needed us, we may have said hurtful things, we may not have said helpful things, we may have acted in ways that were cruel, or not sufficiently kind. We may not have stood up for what we know to be right.
We may have repeated our mistakes over and over again.
According to our tradition, we aren’t trapped in old behavior.
What we got wrong in the past we can get right today if we try again.
The philosopher and rabbi Moses Maimondes defined repentance, teshuvah, as follows:
If the situation where you sinned before presents itself again and this time you do the right thing, that is full repentance. That is תשובה גמורה teshuvah g'murah. (Maimonides Hilchot Teshuva, 2:1)
Most of us are not evil and we don’t do evil things. We get caught up in ourselves - our preoccupations, our fears. We say or do hurtful things or we are not sufficiently responsive to other people.
I want to explore this globally, communally and personally, starting far away and getting progressively closer.
This past winter I went to Guatemala on a human rights trip with American Jewish World Service. I learned a lot on that trip that I didn’t know before I went.
Before I went, I didn’t know that journalists there are routinely arrested, sometimes tortured and even killed for writing the truth. I didn’t know that in March of 2017, 40 teenage girls died in an orphanage fire after guards refused to allow them to escape. We spoke to journalists who are risking their lives and we saw a memorial exhibit for the teenage girls.
AJWS opened my eyes to the systematic abuses of human rights that are taking place a 5 hour flight away from here in a place that we don’t talk about much.
When I spoke about my trip months ago, many people expressed their interest and appreciation. Some people said to me, I’m paraphrasing, Rabbi, that was interesting, but we’re Jewish. We need to worry about ourselves. You should talk more about the challenges that Israel is facing.
To which I said, and say, two things.
One, we talk about Israel a lot. And we encourage supporting Israel by visiting, by donating, by helping numerous organizations including our sister synagogue in Ashkelon, a city in the south of Israel that is often a target of rockets fired by Hamas. And we should continue to offer all of that help and more. If you haven’t contributed to our Israel Affairs Committee Fund to help our brothers and sisters in Israel, please do and please continue to support whatever organizations in Israel you are supporting.
And definitely consider sending your children to the amazing teen trip to Israel this February led by Moji, Avi Siegel and me.
Two, children of Abraham and Sarah, which we are, are supposed to bring blessing to כל משפחות האדמה kol mishp'hot ha’adama, all the families of the earth.
Dr. Arnold Eisen, head of JTS, recently wrote: “For centuries Judaism has instructed us to see ourselves as part of a distinct people and religious community and also as part of larger wholes: our city, our country, humanity, our world.”
And so we should help ourselves and we should help others. There’s enough to go around.
If we haven’t been responsive to people in distress, our people or other people, then we need to TRY AGAIN and do what is right.
Here are some things I hope we will all consider, whatever our ideological predilections:
If we rush to criticize Israel before we know the facts, and especially if we do it publicly, on social media, I urge that we TRY AGAIN and get our facts straight before we speak or write or post. Israel is far from perfect, criticizing can often be justified and even helpful, but we should be careful of the facts before we speak and post and then we should find appropriate ways to discuss Israel’s shortcomings along with her many accomplishments.
If we have been quiet as we see a rise an anti-Semitism in this country, and also a rise in racism, in transphobia and homophobia, in demeaning attitudes toward women, in inhumane treatment of people who seek to immigrate to this country, we must TRY AGAIN and do what is right - to speak out and advocate on behalf of equality and decency FOR ALL PEOPLE. We rise together or we fall together. If we’ve been silent through it all, we need to try again, to speak, to act, to march, on behalf of the Jewish, American, human values of equality and decency.
There’s a genocide going on in Myanmar, on the other side of the world. If we read accounts and look at pictures that document the murder and torture and rape of innocent people and then we click on something else and go on with our lives, we must TRY AGAIN and do what’s right, which includes raising awareness and petitioning elected officials to respond the way we wish leaders and concerned citizens had responded to our people 80 years ago.
We’re busy, we’re preoccupied, we get caught up in our own lives. But we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of doing what we know is right. And what’s right is as follows:
The way we want to be treated, that’s how we should treat others. The world we want for ourselves is the world we should help create for others. So said the sage Hillel and the philosopher Immanuel Kant, but did we really need them to tell us this?
If we have been unresponsive or dismissive as human beings are being treated in ways that we know are wrong, in ways that we don’t want to be treated, then we must TRY AGAIN to speak, to act, to advocate for equality and opportunity and decency.
Closer to home, I urge us to consider how we behave toward the people in our day to day lives, people we see at synagogue, at school or at work.
If we make disparaging jokes about people based on gender or ethnicity or race or how they look, if we laugh when others make those jokes, or if we just say nothing at all, we need to TRY AGAIN and speak out.
Guys hanging out at school who hear your friends saying things about your female peers that you know are not ok. Adult men hearing such things. If up to now we laughed along, or we stayed quiet even though we know it’s wrong - when it happens again, which it probably will, we need to TRY AGAIN. And stand up straight and say, “This is not ok.”
Men don’t need to have sisters or daughters to know that demeaning women is wrong, or to support the full engagement of women in every aspect of communal and political life. We just need to have a brain, a soul and a pulse.
If institutions - schools, offices, houses of worship - do not respond sufficiently when people come forward to say that they have been mistreated or, God forbid, harassed or abused, we need to TRY AGAIN and take such claims seriously.
If we as a synagogue have yet to make this a place where everyone feels welcome - whatever their background, whatever their story - then we need to TRY AGAIN. And again. And again.
Moving even closer. We often make the most mistakes with the people who are closest to us. We criticize them harshly. We don’t have enough patience for them. We take them for granted. We assume they’ll love us no matter what and spend too much energy and time trying to win the admiration of everyone else.
With the people closest to us, our life partners and our children and our siblings and our parents and our dearest friends - we mess up again and again.
When my children were growing up, I was very concerned about establishing my career, wondering - what does the congregation think of me? What do my colleagues think of me? That concern affected all kinds of decisions large and small. What if I don’t get back to someone immediately, even if I’m with my family and it’s not urgent? What if I don’t attend every meeting, every occasion?
And then there were times that I would come home upset with something going on in the synagogue - a dilemma, or a frustration - and rather than process it fully where it belonged, I would bring the frustration home. As a result my mind was elsewhere. Or I was sarcastic and annoyed with the people who didn’t deserve it. Or I didn’t always listen carefully enough when I needed to. Or I didn’t relax enough to enjoy the sweet pleasures of being with loved ones.
If we are more worried about what everyone else thinks of us than how present we are for our loved ones. If the choices we make demonstrate that our priorities are misplaced. If we bring the frustrations of work home more than we should. Then we need to TRY AGAIN. I’ve tried to make different choices lately, choices that leave sufficient time and emotional space for my family while still being present for the community.
Turns out, it helps everyone. When I’m a better father and husband, I’m also a better rabbi. As any middle schooler will tell you - well Duh.
So try to think about your own life, your own priorities. If you’re giving your loved ones the leftovers when they should be getting the main course. TRY AGAIN. If you bring anger and frustration and sarcasm to your loved ones that they don’t deserve. TRY AGAIN. Don’t wait til tomorrow - try again TODAY.
It’s hard to try again. It’s hard to get right what we know we got wrong. The Israeli poet, Yehudah Amichai, put it the following way. Our souls are professional, he wrote.
It’s our bodies that are amateurs. The body tries and makes mistakes, it doesn’t learn, it gets confused, drunk and blind in its pleasures and its pains.
No matter what we will continue to make mistakes, adrift in our pleasure, our pain, our indifference, our frustration, our weakness, our insecurity, the list goes on.
But our tradition says to us - we have the ability and the responsibility, body and soul, to try again. To try THIS time to say the right thing, to do the right thing.
To try THIS time to speak up on behalf of the people across the world and down the hall who need us to speak up.
To pay attention THIS TIME to the people closest to us, the people who deserve the best we have to offer.
I ask each of us to pick one person, one situation, where we got it wrong. Think of that person, think of that situation. Who is the Randall to our Kevin? Who did we walk past when they needed us to walk in?
And now I ask each of us - can we TRY AGAIN? Can we do our best to get right what we got wrong? I promise you it’s contagious. If you do it once, it will spread. Before you know it, you’ll do it more for this person, and it will spread to others, and those you do right by, will in turn do right by others.
On Passover we sing day-einu. I’ve thought about writing a song for Rosh Hashanah called TRY-EINU. Let’s try again.
Little by little, action by action, word by word, person by person, the world will become a better place because each of us decided, in ways large and small, that we would 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.
At a certain point in our lives we may have done the wrong thing, or not done the right thing, for whatever reasons.
We may not have been there for people who needed us, we may have said hurtful things, we may not have said helpful things, we may have acted in ways that were cruel, or not sufficiently kind. We may not have stood up for what we know to be right.
We may have repeated our mistakes over and over again.
According to our tradition, we aren’t trapped in old behavior.
What we got wrong in the past we can get right today if we try again.
The philosopher and rabbi Moses Maimondes defined repentance, teshuvah, as follows:
If the situation where you sinned before presents itself again and this time you do the right thing, that is full repentance. That is תשובה גמורה teshuvah g'murah. (Maimonides Hilchot Teshuva, 2:1)
Most of us are not evil and we don’t do evil things. We get caught up in ourselves - our preoccupations, our fears. We say or do hurtful things or we are not sufficiently responsive to other people.
I want to explore this globally, communally and personally, starting far away and getting progressively closer.
This past winter I went to Guatemala on a human rights trip with American Jewish World Service. I learned a lot on that trip that I didn’t know before I went.
Before I went, I didn’t know that journalists there are routinely arrested, sometimes tortured and even killed for writing the truth. I didn’t know that in March of 2017, 40 teenage girls died in an orphanage fire after guards refused to allow them to escape. We spoke to journalists who are risking their lives and we saw a memorial exhibit for the teenage girls.
AJWS opened my eyes to the systematic abuses of human rights that are taking place a 5 hour flight away from here in a place that we don’t talk about much.
When I spoke about my trip months ago, many people expressed their interest and appreciation. Some people said to me, I’m paraphrasing, Rabbi, that was interesting, but we’re Jewish. We need to worry about ourselves. You should talk more about the challenges that Israel is facing.
To which I said, and say, two things.
One, we talk about Israel a lot. And we encourage supporting Israel by visiting, by donating, by helping numerous organizations including our sister synagogue in Ashkelon, a city in the south of Israel that is often a target of rockets fired by Hamas. And we should continue to offer all of that help and more. If you haven’t contributed to our Israel Affairs Committee Fund to help our brothers and sisters in Israel, please do and please continue to support whatever organizations in Israel you are supporting.
And definitely consider sending your children to the amazing teen trip to Israel this February led by Moji, Avi Siegel and me.
Two, children of Abraham and Sarah, which we are, are supposed to bring blessing to כל משפחות האדמה kol mishp'hot ha’adama, all the families of the earth.
Dr. Arnold Eisen, head of JTS, recently wrote: “For centuries Judaism has instructed us to see ourselves as part of a distinct people and religious community and also as part of larger wholes: our city, our country, humanity, our world.”
And so we should help ourselves and we should help others. There’s enough to go around.
If we haven’t been responsive to people in distress, our people or other people, then we need to TRY AGAIN and do what is right.
Here are some things I hope we will all consider, whatever our ideological predilections:
If we rush to criticize Israel before we know the facts, and especially if we do it publicly, on social media, I urge that we TRY AGAIN and get our facts straight before we speak or write or post. Israel is far from perfect, criticizing can often be justified and even helpful, but we should be careful of the facts before we speak and post and then we should find appropriate ways to discuss Israel’s shortcomings along with her many accomplishments.
If we have been quiet as we see a rise an anti-Semitism in this country, and also a rise in racism, in transphobia and homophobia, in demeaning attitudes toward women, in inhumane treatment of people who seek to immigrate to this country, we must TRY AGAIN and do what is right - to speak out and advocate on behalf of equality and decency FOR ALL PEOPLE. We rise together or we fall together. If we’ve been silent through it all, we need to try again, to speak, to act, to march, on behalf of the Jewish, American, human values of equality and decency.
There’s a genocide going on in Myanmar, on the other side of the world. If we read accounts and look at pictures that document the murder and torture and rape of innocent people and then we click on something else and go on with our lives, we must TRY AGAIN and do what’s right, which includes raising awareness and petitioning elected officials to respond the way we wish leaders and concerned citizens had responded to our people 80 years ago.
We’re busy, we’re preoccupied, we get caught up in our own lives. But we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of doing what we know is right. And what’s right is as follows:
The way we want to be treated, that’s how we should treat others. The world we want for ourselves is the world we should help create for others. So said the sage Hillel and the philosopher Immanuel Kant, but did we really need them to tell us this?
If we have been unresponsive or dismissive as human beings are being treated in ways that we know are wrong, in ways that we don’t want to be treated, then we must TRY AGAIN to speak, to act, to advocate for equality and opportunity and decency.
Closer to home, I urge us to consider how we behave toward the people in our day to day lives, people we see at synagogue, at school or at work.
If we make disparaging jokes about people based on gender or ethnicity or race or how they look, if we laugh when others make those jokes, or if we just say nothing at all, we need to TRY AGAIN and speak out.
Guys hanging out at school who hear your friends saying things about your female peers that you know are not ok. Adult men hearing such things. If up to now we laughed along, or we stayed quiet even though we know it’s wrong - when it happens again, which it probably will, we need to TRY AGAIN. And stand up straight and say, “This is not ok.”
Men don’t need to have sisters or daughters to know that demeaning women is wrong, or to support the full engagement of women in every aspect of communal and political life. We just need to have a brain, a soul and a pulse.
If institutions - schools, offices, houses of worship - do not respond sufficiently when people come forward to say that they have been mistreated or, God forbid, harassed or abused, we need to TRY AGAIN and take such claims seriously.
If we as a synagogue have yet to make this a place where everyone feels welcome - whatever their background, whatever their story - then we need to TRY AGAIN. And again. And again.
Moving even closer. We often make the most mistakes with the people who are closest to us. We criticize them harshly. We don’t have enough patience for them. We take them for granted. We assume they’ll love us no matter what and spend too much energy and time trying to win the admiration of everyone else.
With the people closest to us, our life partners and our children and our siblings and our parents and our dearest friends - we mess up again and again.
When my children were growing up, I was very concerned about establishing my career, wondering - what does the congregation think of me? What do my colleagues think of me? That concern affected all kinds of decisions large and small. What if I don’t get back to someone immediately, even if I’m with my family and it’s not urgent? What if I don’t attend every meeting, every occasion?
And then there were times that I would come home upset with something going on in the synagogue - a dilemma, or a frustration - and rather than process it fully where it belonged, I would bring the frustration home. As a result my mind was elsewhere. Or I was sarcastic and annoyed with the people who didn’t deserve it. Or I didn’t always listen carefully enough when I needed to. Or I didn’t relax enough to enjoy the sweet pleasures of being with loved ones.
If we are more worried about what everyone else thinks of us than how present we are for our loved ones. If the choices we make demonstrate that our priorities are misplaced. If we bring the frustrations of work home more than we should. Then we need to TRY AGAIN. I’ve tried to make different choices lately, choices that leave sufficient time and emotional space for my family while still being present for the community.
Turns out, it helps everyone. When I’m a better father and husband, I’m also a better rabbi. As any middle schooler will tell you - well Duh.
So try to think about your own life, your own priorities. If you’re giving your loved ones the leftovers when they should be getting the main course. TRY AGAIN. If you bring anger and frustration and sarcasm to your loved ones that they don’t deserve. TRY AGAIN. Don’t wait til tomorrow - try again TODAY.
It’s hard to try again. It’s hard to get right what we know we got wrong. The Israeli poet, Yehudah Amichai, put it the following way. Our souls are professional, he wrote.
It’s our bodies that are amateurs. The body tries and makes mistakes, it doesn’t learn, it gets confused, drunk and blind in its pleasures and its pains.
No matter what we will continue to make mistakes, adrift in our pleasure, our pain, our indifference, our frustration, our weakness, our insecurity, the list goes on.
But our tradition says to us - we have the ability and the responsibility, body and soul, to try again. To try THIS time to say the right thing, to do the right thing.
To try THIS time to speak up on behalf of the people across the world and down the hall who need us to speak up.
To pay attention THIS TIME to the people closest to us, the people who deserve the best we have to offer.
I ask each of us to pick one person, one situation, where we got it wrong. Think of that person, think of that situation. Who is the Randall to our Kevin? Who did we walk past when they needed us to walk in?
And now I ask each of us - can we TRY AGAIN? Can we do our best to get right what we got wrong? I promise you it’s contagious. If you do it once, it will spread. Before you know it, you’ll do it more for this person, and it will spread to others, and those you do right by, will in turn do right by others.
On Passover we sing day-einu. I’ve thought about writing a song for Rosh Hashanah called TRY-EINU. Let’s try again.
Little by little, action by action, word by word, person by person, the world will become a better place because each of us decided, in ways large and small, that we would try again.
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