Yamim Nora'im 5769
High Holy Days 2009
Ohavi Zedek Synagogue
Burlington, Vermont
Rabbi Joshua Chasan

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5769

Good yontov. It's good to see you.

Over the past two thousand years and more of our people's observance of Rosh Hashanah, imagine the variety of crises going on as the new year approached. Cholera epidemics, pogroms, war. For most Jews most of the time, the insecurity of the marketplace was a given. As the first day of the year approached, Jews turned with courage within and made preparations for the spiritual work traditionally commanded.

Each year, whatever winds were blowing at their doors, our ancestors would gather in great numbers for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. About four hundred years ago, Rabbi Hayyim ben Bezalel of Frieberg reminded his congregants that it is customary for the country folk to come to the city for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to pray, "in the multitude of people."

On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur all Israel gather together from all their places and villages into one place, which is not true of any other holiday. There is a reason for this custom, for it is well known that when a king or queen is crowned, people come from all the towns in the realm to the capital to see the new sovereign honored. For it is said that "in the multitude of people is the sovereign's glory."

Remember that this teaching is four hundred years old, predating the coming of the democratic spirit. Yet it works so well for us, these many years later. We honor the sovereignty of the divine by coming together in larger numbers than during the rest of the year. The essential purpose of our prayers on Rosh Hashanah is that God's great Name be sanctified in the universe.

Our ancestors would weep and be sorrowful in their hearts as they prepared for this great and awesome Day of Judgment, because of the profanation of God's great Name during the past year. How it was that God's great Name was profaned during the past year is the subject of each of our own soul searching during these ten days of repentance, these aseret yamai t'shuvah. God knows the ways each of us has lost sight of the glory of God. God knows the ways that we, together as a people, as human beings, have lost sight. You don't need a weather report to know which way the winds are blowing.

These ten days are a good opportunity for us to set aside the headlines and cable news. Do we dare refrain from monitoring the market place and concentrate on the well being of our souls? Tradition teaches us that we dare not neglect the state of our souls, for the root of our well being is grounded in our capacity to give God the glory; as we will sing over and over again on Yom Kippur, that we are God's people and the divine is our God.

Torah reading on the first day of Rosh Hashanah 5769

Each year we return to the story of Chanah for the Haftarah on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. There's a clear connection between her yearning for a child and the yearning of Sarah. In addition, though, the story of Chanah and her prayer takes us through the full journey of the Jewish people-as it says in the Hagadah shel Pesah-at the seder we are taught to tell the story from despair to liberation.

In truth, as Jews, we are never solely at one end of the story or the other, and this year is no exception. The situation for our brothers and sisters in the State of Israel remains confused and dangerous. Iran continues to develop its nuclear capabilities, and we all live with great anxiety about the continued assault on the existence of a Jewish state. We want to believe that a two-state solution is still possible, because the alternative would appear to be tyranny and murder. Perhaps a new Israeli government can break through. Yet we are forced to agree with Yuval Steinitz, one-time supporter of Oslo and now a Likud member of the Kenesset, when he writes that "the idea of a two-state solution should be dead, today, because unfortunately a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would bring about Israel's demise" because it would "immediately become an outpost for Iran." Steinitz believes that, in supporting Oslo, "we underestimated the pressure coming from the outside Arab world against real peace."

Yet we also condemn, as did the Israeli government, the vigilante attacks by settlers on Arabs, "pogroms" Olmert called them. We pray that the next president places a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the top of his agenda, but we are very concerned about risks that the citizens of Israel may be forced to make when there really does not seem to be a partner for peace. President Abbas calls for peace even as he embraces the recently released Palestinian murderer of Israeli children.

Here, closer to home in Vermont, the insecurity is much less physical. It continues to find expression in a weekly program on Channel 15, advocating (often hatefully) for the end of a Jewish state of Israel. Once again, the Art Hop was used to bash Israel. This year, any doubt about the crossing of the line between legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and anti-Semitism was erased by art work that played on classical themes of historic anti-Semitism-the blood libel of Jews killing children and the old canard of Jews controlling the world, in this case the United States.

These images appeared in Burlington in the wake of a summer during which a swastika was allowed to remain on a building from early July through mid-August, in full view for children playing in an Old North End park. Twice during the past year, a swastika appeared on a Burlington School building, once with hateful words about African-Americans and gay men and lesbians. The handwriting was not that of a child. Already this year, a swastika appeared on the wall of another school. School authorities were quick to remove these messages and are interested in working cooperatively to address the issue

I wouldn't call these events a pattern yet, but they certainly speak to what's being thought and said underground. When I was displaying my sculpture at the Art Hop, a woman saw my yarmulke and perhaps my use of my Hebrew name and said to me and her friends, "This must be the Jewish end of the Art Hop." Embarrassed, she quickly apologized, confirming where she was coming from. Another woman, a non-Jewish friend, recently confessed that she was ashamed of herself for thinking, "What's wrong with the Jews today?"

There's nothing wrong with us today. We are legitimately anxious when we read reports in the press that Teheran has surreptitiously removed sufficient amount of uranium from its nuclear production facility in Isfahan to produce six nuclear. And that the International Atomic Energy Agency recently reported that Iran has taken steps to enable its Shihab-3 ballistic missiles, which can reach Israel, to carry nuclear weapons. This information comes, not from neo-conservatives but from the international watchdog agency. Will these reports go down in history beside the news smuggled out of Europe in the forties about what was happening in the camps?

As we turn to the story of Chanah, let's remind ourselves that there is nothing inappropriate about our anxiety as Jews today. We continue to seek peace. We jump with hope at a report in the New York Times about religious détente in Jenin. And we pray for the wisdom of Chanah, to see things for what they are, as painful as they may be, and the grace of Chanah to welcome answers to our prayers.

First Rosh Hashanah Morning 5769

Shanah tovah. Gut yontov. It's great to be back together again, to see all of you here this morning.

I hope your summer was a good one (remember summer?). Back in July, looking ahead to standing here now, I jokingly asked Kathy: "I don't suppose on yontov, the congregation will want to hear about my hernia surgery." Not missing a beat, Kathy said, "I'm sure they'd prefer that to your talking about "I and Thou."

I've been pretty close to the ground of late. As many of you know, my father died shortly after I shared with you, at this time last year, what was going on for him in what turned out to be his final month. Sometimes we have a sense of what's coming; more often, we do not know what is right around the corner. Always we are left to choose how to deal with what we are given. How we deal with what we are given is the challenge of these days of awe, yamim nora'im.

I am grateful for all of your support through the year, allowing me to say kaddish each day. After the death of a parent, we say kaddish for eleven months. This past year was a leap year, with thirteen months, so my eleven months ended early in September. My father's yahrzeit is Sunday, November 2nd, and Kathy and I invite you to join us for breakfast at OZ that morning, to thank you for the sanctuary that you create at this synagogue all year round.

We need sanctuary today. There is so much fear in the air, so much dishonesty, so much insecurity for us as Jews, as human beings. We need both physical places of sanctuary, and we need places in our heart where we are able to feel safe, secure, where we can be truly free.

There are too many prisons nowadays; far more prison space than sanctuary. Consider the impingements on our freedom, beyond the fact that the United States has 2.2 million people literally locked up. In our name, our government tortures prisoners, suspends habeus corpus.

Beyond this physical incarceration, our economy is closing down on us. Many of us personally are in debt. Huge banks have buckled. Some of us will have trouble paying for heat this winter. Our adult children are struggling to maintain a standard of living that comes even close to our own or their grandparents.

We face an additional threat to our freedom as Jews. The siege against the State of Israel's physical existence continues. As I mentioned before the chanting of the Haftarah, hatred of Zionism has raised the level of anti-Semitism, even here in Vermont.

A combination of political and economic conditions has created, to use the poet Leonard Cohen's image, a threat to overturn the order of our souls. In the face of such a storm, what we need is less prison and more sanctuary. We need places of sanctuary, where we can collect ourselves, gird our loins, and insist on our human right, not only to physical and psychological security, but also to real freedom.

Real freedom begins within us. Sanctuary begins within our own souls. Remember the Soviet refusenik, Anatoly, now Natan, Scharansky. Imprisoned in the bitterest conditions of the Soviet gulag, he clung to freedom, he created freedom, within his own soul. At a reception in his honor at the Israeli embassy in Washington, years after his imprisonment, Scharansky told a story about the intensity of the battle for freedom which he fought in prison.

One year while he was locked up, he was able to begin to celebrate Chanukah with some non-Jewish prisoners who helped him create a menorah and candles. Eventually, however, the prison guards confiscated his menorah and candles and he was forbidden to celebrate the holiday further, the Soviets said, because "a camp is not a synagogue." Apparently they didn't know that Chanukah is a home celebration, and Scharansky did not need to be told that a prison camp is not a home.

To protect the freedom inside his soul, Scharansky immediately went on a hunger strike. He knew that once he had asserted his freedom to celebrate Chanukah, he could not retreat without losing a piece of the freedom he had created and nurtured for himself within the prison. Fortunately, the prison authorities were expecting the visit of state inspectors from Moscow and they didn't want Scharansky on a hunger strike when they arrived. So they asked him what it would take for him to start eating. Scharansky said that he would eat only if he were allowed to celebrate the one remaining n ight of Hanukah. He also insisted that he be permitted to do so in the prison chief's office, a much warmer place than Scharansky's cell. In addition, he asked the prison official to bow his head when Scharansky prayed and then say amen at the end. Scharansky assured him this wouldn't take long. In the world in which we live, the assertion of freedom often requires a good amount of chutzpah.

The menorah appeared and Scharansky began a long prayer in Hebrew, adding words to the candle lighting blessing, repeating them. Soon wax from the candles was dripping on the chief's beautifully finished wooden desk. At the end, in Hebrew, Scharansky prayed that he would soon be able to celebrate Hanukah with his family in Jerusalem and added, "May the day come when all our enemies, who today plan our destruction, will stand before us and hear our prayers and say, 'Amen." On cue, the prison chief, relieved that the prayer was finally over, echoed, "Amen."

Whether we like his politics today or not, Natan Scharansky's witness to freedom is for the ages. "They tried their best to find a place where I was isolated," he recollected. "But all the resources of a superpower cannot isolate the man who hears a voice of freedom, a voice I heard from the very chamber of my soul."

Remember when the Soviets finally released him? On the front page of the New York Times was the photograph of a man, clinging to the book of Psalms which had sustained him through the years of confinement. He had refused to cross the bridge into freedom until they returned that book. He came home to Israel a free man, for he had remained free under the most tyrannical of conditions.

Surely, under much less confining and invasive conditions, we can summon the courage to confront the insecurity threat to freedom that we face. The economy is a mess. Our government has stepped on the Constitution. Distortion and outright lying rule the political process. Yet we are quite capable of stepping up to the challenge of these threats by creating the kind of inner sanctuary which Natan Scharansky built within his soul, moment by moment. This sanctuary grounds us as we come together to defend our freedom.

Sometimes we are fortunate enough to find that God sends the sanctuary. You know the feeling when you wake from a powerful dream, refreshed, liberated. Remember our ancestor Jacob, locked in the prison of his guilt about deceiving his brother. On the run from Esau, Jacob grew tired and lay down, drawing a stone for a pillow under his head. He dreamed of the ladder with angels coming and going. Then he awakened. The gates of the prison of his guilt had opened, and Jacob found himself in a sanctuary.

"Surely the Eternal is here in this place," he said, "and I did not know. Mah nora ha'makom ha'zeh, "how awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God and this is the gate of the heavens." (Gen 28:16-17)

Mah nora ha'makom ha'zeh, how awesome is this place! I suspect that many of you-I certainly have had such ah ha moments when, suddenly, whatever burden it is that we are carrying is lifted--by a sight or a song, a good cry, or a hug. At such moments, we return to the default setting of the human heart: Mah nora ha'makom ha'zeh, how awesome is this place of being alive. The key to the lock turns and the gates open.

Sometimes God sends the sanctuary. More often, we have to step up to the plate, like Scharansky, walk into the fear, never surrender freedom that is threatened. Remember Esther in ancient Persia. Haman was moving to annihilate our people. Fear was in the air. Urged by her uncle Mordechai to hide her Jewish identity, Esther revealed herself as a Jew before the king and saved our people. The key to the lock turned and the gates opened.

The challenge is always dramatic, but the response required need not be theatrical at all. More often than not, it is simply a matter of honest acceptance of our situation. For our ancient ancestors, slaves in Egypt, their liberation began when they realized that they were slaves. Sometimes our freedom is grounded in basic acceptance of what is placed in our laps by the unfolding of time. Many of the prisons in which we find ourselves constrained are the result of our fear of the unknown.

As I said before, we know what kind of mighty blows can be waiting just around the corner. Our weekly prayer for healing on Shabbat includes many names; so many amongst us having received diagnoses of potentially fatal diseases. Add this to the violence of war and dangerous economic conditions, if we really want to resist the overturning of the order of our souls, we must find the courage the courage of Sharansky and Esther.

Not to deny the blizzard of conditions that threatens to overturn the order of our souls; those conditions are as real as the violence of war and the hunger of poverty and the terror of suicide bombs and torture. Yet, if we are to avoid the overturning of the order of our souls, we must summon the courage to find the wisdom to stand our ground. It is the wisdom that the poet Yeats suggests comes with the courage just to accept the unfolding of time. It is the wisdom that we find in the folds of the time which we are privileged to be given.

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

To wither into the truth: it is a privilege given us if we are afforded the time. Think of the courage of our loved ones, taken before the fullness of their time, who faced their knowledge of the closeness of their death with a greatness of wisdom. May their example guide us to our own courage.

Certainly we Jews, living in the relative comfort and security of northern New England, can pull ourselves together to stand the ground of our freedom here in Vermont, in Israel, and wherever Jews live. Of course we must vote in November. And just as certainly, voting is not enough. We must continue to create the sanctuary of this synagogue, and extend its safety, security, and freedom.

About six months after my father died, he began to appear in my dreams. All of the distance between us when he was alive, a consequence of his life-long rejection of traditional religion and my mid-life embracing of it, was gone. He speaks clearly to me now of how important it is for us to be vigilant and unafraid to be free-to be free like Scharansky, by being unafraid of gaining wisdom in the harshest of circumstances.

A child of the depression, my father was mindful of the need for economic security. Beyond that security, he never really cared about money. He truly cared about freedom. In fact, his concern about my finding a place in organized religion was centered on his conviction that, over the ages, organized religion had negatively impacted on human freedom.

After a couple of youthful decades in which he actively organized for social change, he settled into working routine like so many of us do. He said then that he had come to the place where he did not want to change the world; he just did not want the world to change him. And it did not. Thank God, he was not tested like Scharansky, yet I know, because I love him, that he was without fear of illegitimate authority.

To follow in his footsteps is a tall order to fill. And have we not already engaged in fulfilling this challenge here at Ohavi Zedek. It began at the congregation's very beginning in our ancestors' choice of a name. As Jeff Potash likes to point out, those were immigrants from an old world in which Jews were subjected to injustice. Here in Vermont they would call themselves "Ohavei Zedek," lovers of justice.

And when World War II was over and they looked upon what had happened
--after all, it was more than banks buckling-they summoned the courage to rebuild. They engaged a rabbi who had the courage to bring in newcomers and speak out against Joe McCarthy-like accusations at the university. And more recently here, we have remained vigilant, loyal to the State of Israel even as we have felt the need to criticize some of its policies. We have embraced the expansion of freedom to marry, and continued to welcome newcomers to the synagogue with a variety of Jewish backgrounds and no Jewish backgrounds at all.

How my father would glow at seeing newly arrived immigrants from Africa, Asia, Europe, learning English in our classrooms; being afforded quality clothing at no charge through our Thrift Shop in the barn behind the synagogue.

May this year be a time of growing sanctuary that we create for ourselves and each other, our neighbors and all of our fellow human beings. May we find more and more concrete ways to deepen our bonds with each other, securing our sanctuary in the depths of our convictions about what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false. For our freedom is founded on righteousness and the truth.

Good yontov. Shanah tovah u'm'tukah, a good and sweet year for us all.

Second Day of Rosh Hashanah 5769

Good yontov. I hope you were able to begin the year well yesterday. We had a wonderful gathering down at the boathouse in the afternoon, and Tashlich from the board walk was as sweet as ever.

Talking about sweetness, perhaps some of you know this story about Moses-not Moshe rabbenu, Moses our teacher, the greatest of our prophets. No, this one is about Moshe Rabinowitz, a very sweet man, I'm told, who emigrated from Lithuania to the U.S. in 1905, coming in through New York City and eventually settling somewhere-no one knows for sure-in northern Vermont.

Moshe Rabinowitz was, by all accounts, a very pious man. He was as careful as the truly pious are want to be. Before he left the old world, Meysh--as he was known to fellow Jews in both old and new worlds-when he decided to come to America, Meysh sold off all his assets and converted them to gold. Then he had a local dentist make him five sets of gold dentures. I'm sorry to say that I have found no one who knows what happened to those teeth.

As you would imagine, when Meysh arrived at Ellis Island, the customs official who inspected his luggage was perplexed as to why anybody would have five sets of gold dentures. And Meysh was happy to explain.

"Nu" Meysh said with grin in his eyes, "this is the goldina medinah, no?" The customs official, being a customs official, didn't smile.

"No, I tell you the truth," Meysh said. "Vee Jews have two separate sets of dishes," he said, "vun for meat and vun for milk. But I am very kosher man; also I have separate sets of teeth."

"Well that accounts for two sets of teeth," said the customs agent, but what about the others?" Meysh was ready.

"Vell, vee very religious Jews, vee use separate dishes for Pesah-what you call Passover. But I am very careful; I have pesadikhah teeth, vun for meat and vun for milk." The customs official scratched his head, but before he could say anything, Meysh continued.

"You vant to know vhy there are five. Vell, to tell you the truth, vonce in a vile, I like a ham sandwich."

Now, I'm not here to make judgments about a ham sandwich. From my old days, I remember. Along with a little swiss cheese, on some fresh Jewish rye, vell, many of you know what I'm talking about. A good Jewish woman, my mother, may she lived to be a hundred and twenty, used to store her best home-made fruit salad in a ham container.

On the other hand, I've eaten kosher very well for close to thirty years, and perhaps some of you will consider, or reconsider, the wonderful discipline of kashrut after I tell you about what is happening, in our own time, with the definition of kosher. No, lobster and filet mignon are still out. Actually, the changes are even better than that and, I just told you, I know of what I speak.

Coming soon, very much in the works, food will be certified as kosher not only on the basis of traditional standards of slaughter and packaging, but also on the basis of the ethical standards of the people who bring it to market. This kosher certification will be based on the producers' record when it comes to worker rights and safety, wages and benefits; employee health, safety and training; the ethical treatment of animals; environmental impact, and corporate transparency and integrity.

The effort to create these new standards of kashrut represent a big change in our understanding of the organization of the Jewish world. Long ago, before the the Enlightenement of the 19th century, Jews were not allowed to be citizens of European states. Instead, Jews were members of the kehilah, the organized Jewish community. Kashrut was administered by the kehilah.

In our time, we have come to take for granted that kosher certification is the domain of private companies, staffed by members of the Orthodox rabbinate. These private companies, like o-u, kaf-k, triangle k, work for the food processors, telling them what is kosher or not kosher about their production. If you think about it, it's a bit of a self-serving process, but so be it, that's been the state of the art of kashrut for a long time.

Now come members of the Conservative movement, supported by leaders of Reform Jews, Reconstructionist Jews, Renewal Jews, and even some within the Orthodox world, who insist that our understanding of kashrut be expanded to include ethical issues such as I described a couple of minutes ago. This new standard of kashrut will not replace the kaf-ks and o-us; it will compliment it.

What a wonderful development for the Jewish people: to transcend the divide between ritual and ethics. I'm reminded of a ma'aseh hai'yah, a true story I heard from a colleague when I was living in New Jersey. This colleague was approached by an Orthodox rabbi who questioned his level of personal observance. My conservative colleague responded: "I'll show you my tzitzit when you show me your income tax returns."

Enough of such division! Are we not one people? When it comes to kosher food, there is a growing number of non-Orthodox Jews who observe kashrut, a number significantly increased by vegetarians who are defining an eco-kashrut, a kashrut that takes into account a new relationship between human beings and other animals.

Now I am not a vegetarian. And I also do not have separate teeth for my brisket on Pesah, though I'm sure I enjoy it as much as Meysh did, the times he could afford to buy it. What I am is a strong supporter of this new initiative which comes out of the Conservative Movement, both expanding the definition of kashrut, and even more significantly, bridging the distinction amongst Jews between ritual and ethics.

This new initiative is called Hekhsher Tzedek, literally a certification of kasrhut based on the ethical standards of those producing and packaging and marketing the food. Let me repeat. This certification is not intended to replace the existing supervision by organizations such as o u and kaf-k, exclusively staffed by Orthodox Jews and supervised by Orthodox rabbis. Hekhsher Tzedek will be in addition to that supervision.

The o u and kaf-k folks will continue to check the animals' lungs and make sure no worker drops a ham sandwich into the vat of churning butter. The Hekhsher Tzedek folks-at present a commission consisting of lay and rabbinical leadership from the Conservative Movement; to be developed into a full-scale, national structure-the Hekhsher Tzedek folks will look into the standards of wages and benefits; employee health, safety and training; product development, including the treatment of animals; environmental impact, and corporate transparency and integrity.

Informally, this process is already going into effect. As a consequence of credible reports from workers and state authorities in both Iowa and New York, many of us who eat kosher meat are refusing to buy the product of Agriprocessors and other companies owned by the family of Aaron Rabashkin, which produce more than sixty percent of the kosher meat on the market here in the United States, with estimated sales of about $80 million.

If you are attentive to issues of kashrut, no doubt you've heard about this company in Jewish media, not to mention The New York Times. You may have noticed that Price Chopper no longer sells meat produced by Agriprocessors and sold under a variety of names. In fact, the u-o, the Orthodox Union threatened to withdraw its certification after criminal charges for more than 9,000 child labor violations were brought against the company in Iowa. According to a report in the Times, "[m]any of the youths worked night shifts in dangerous jobs that exposed them to hazardous chemicals, according to the charges." According to the Iowa Attorney General's office, the children, as young as fourteen, were encouraged to submit forged identification documents that were known to contain false information about their resident status, age and identity. The more than nine thousand violations alleged by the State of Iowa fall into five categories: employing a child under age 18 in a meatpacking plant; employing a child under 18 in an occupation that exposes the child to dangerous or poisonous chemicals; employing a child under 16 who operated power m achinery; employing a child under age 16 who worked during prohibited hours or more hours in a day than permitted by, and employing a child under 16 who worked more days in a week than permitted by law."

Yes, these are only allegations at this point. And, at the same time, the workers, including the children, have been speaking out. According to one of their attorneys, Parras Konrad, the children told her that "they were hungry all the time. It was freezing cold or burning hot."

Many in the Orthodox world quickly circled the wagons in response to these charges, claiming they boiled down to anti-Semitism.

"Kosher is kosher," Rabbi Basil Herring, the executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America, recently said; "and kosher reflects the requirements of what renders an animal . . . acceptable for a Jew to properly eat. Of course there are always ethical concerns whether it's regarding food or clothing or furniture . . . but it is inappropriate to mix the two realms together."

"On humanitarian grounds, I support [the idea of Hekhsher Tzedek], says Rabbi Sheftel Neuberger, a leader in Baltimore's Orthodox Jewish community. "But I don't think it's a rabbinic issue . . .; Are they going to also choose which sneaker company to endorse."

No, responds Rabbi Morris Allen, the innovator of the Hekhsher Tzedek concept, who got involved when he visited the Iowa slaughter house for other purposes. "I'm not obligated to buy Nike Shoes; I am obligated to buy kosher food. I can't fix business practices throughout the world . . . but I do have a responsibility to be involved in trying to address an industry that I am dependent upon in order to fulfill my Jewish life," says Rabbi Allen.

Why is this issue so important? First of all, obviously, because of the mistreatment of workers, including children-mistreatment not only by the owners of the plant but also by the government. As The Forward newspaper editorialized, it was the federal government "which mounted a massive enforcement raid in which the targets were not the company executives and shop managers suspected of shorting paychecks, ignoring safety requirements and extorting workers for money and sex-but rather, the government targeted workers, the helpless victims in the episode, for violating immigration rules in their quest to make a living."

This issue is significant because it speaks to the integrity of Judaism, Judaism's capacity to integrate its traditional rituals with its ethical standards. To what do we bear witness when we profess to fulfill God's command not to eat treife meat, non-kosher meat, when the kosher meat that we eat comes from an animal slaughtered by undocumented workers, including children, afraid to speak up about working conditions, workers who are paid a pittance of a wage; and then, when they try to organize a union, are told that they have no right to be unionized because they are undocumented workers. The company is appealing to the United States Supreme Court. It's a new level of chutzpah.

How can we call meat "kosher" when it is from animals slaughtered in unsanitary conditions both for the animals and the workers, who were lured to Iowa by the promise of a job and then left to be arrested and deported by the INS? Is not this meat, which is marketed as glatt ko sher, as treife as that ham sandwich?

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches us-this is from his book, Insecurity of Freedom-"The teaching of Judaism is the theology of the common deed. The Bible insists that God is concerned with everydayness, with the trivialities of life . . . in how we manage the commonplace. The prophet's field of concern is not the mysteries of heaven . . but the blights of society, the affairs of the marketplace. He addresses himself to those who trample upon the needy, who increase the price of grain [and oil], use dishonest scales and sell the refuse of corn (Amos 8:4-6). The predominant feature of the biblical pattern of life is unassuming, unheroic, inconspicuous piety . . . "The wages of the hired servant shall not abide with thee . . ." (Lev. 19:13) . . . . The challenge we face is a test of our integrity."

We already have begun to respond to the challenge. The Board of Directors of Ohavi Zedek Synagogue supports my decision to forbid the use of meat produced by Agriprocessors and related companies until they meet the standards of Hekhsher Tzedek. Until the full supervisory structure of Hekhsher Tzedek is in place, in conjunction with Sisterhood, the Kitchen Committee and the Religious Committee, we will endeavor to operate our synagogue kitchen in accord with standards of both ritual and ethical kashrut.

This communal life of Ohavi Zedek Synagogue bears witness to authentic Jewish values and practice. We reach out to all Jews, regardless of affiliation, to build a Judaism that is true to the full breadth and depth of our people's heritage. Shanah tovah u'm'tukah, a good and sweet new year for all of us. And if anyone comes across Meysh's golden teeth, the synagogue's archives has a special place waiting for their display.

Good yontov. Shanah tovah u'm'tukah, a good and sweet year for us all.

Kol Nidrei 5769

Good yontov. What a wonderful evening! What a unique time, these twenty five hours, set aside for us, by tradition, for atonement on Yom Kippur.

The whole of this day is greater than its parts. The wonder of it, the joy that quietly grows over the hours, even as our hunger makes more difficult our doing the time. For each of us, the opportunity to go to the center of our soul, to encounter the core of our being, is now upon us. Upon us: this is the literal meaning of the Hebrew word alenu, the name of a prayer central to these yamim nora'im, these Days of Awe. It is upon us; it is incumbent upon us.

Incumbent upon us is the understanding of our tradition that, being human, we are responsible to a divine command. Incumbent upon us, this day, is the divine command that we allow ourselves to break down. Just as, on Rosh Hashanah, the notes of the shofar break down, from tekiah to shvarim to truah.

This is a midrash I learned from our contemporary, Rabbi Arthur Green, who teaches it in the name of Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz of Prague and Jerusalem, who lived in the 17th century.

We enter Rosh Hashanah whole, like one secure tekiah. As we go through Rosh Hashanah, the whole tekiah begins to break down into the three notes of shevarim. Then it fragments further into the brokenness of the staccato notes of tru'ah, which we carry through the days following Rosh Hashanah into this evening, as we begin Yom Kippur.

With God's help and our own willingness to embrace our own emotional fragmentation, during this Day of Atonement, we will work our way through the coming hours, until tomorrow night. Then, after all the fasting and praying, all the repetition of words and melodies, we can find our way home, home to the sustained note of tekiah g'dolah, the great wholeness of the repair of our souls. We know how welcome will come that sound, both as a dinner bell and, even more significantly, as a call to remember what, with God's help and our own willingness, we will have learned in the course of these hours.

Atonement is about change. There is no dissembling about this kind of change. On Yom Kippur, our hearts grow sensitive to the baseness of contemporary standards of dishonesty and greed. We cannot afford-in our own soul searching, we cannot afford to accept the low bar of contemporary political and economic discourse.

Unwrapping the layers of the onion of our soul, we are engaged in a sacred reckoning. We are trying to get in touch with what is sacred for us, our own deepest expectations about justice and compassion. And through this spiritual effort, we have the chance to renew our vision and hopes for ourselves and each other in the world at large.

We tend to lose such focus during the year. For this reason, our tradition set aside these past nine days for hard self-probing. And we are given this tenth day, totally to tune out politics and reports from the market. We are given this tenth day with nothing to do but self-probe.

By definition, spiritual searching is not all rational. Who amongst us would dare claim complete rationality by tomorrow afternoon? Our eyes will skip about the page as we lean, both on the pew before us and on the repetition of melodies which we love-melodies for this day alone. It is such sweet music for the bittersweet task of measuring ourselves against a plumb line of the truth-all the truth that we have the courage to hold ourselves up against.

We take our own measure emotionally, allowing the music to recondition our heart. We also do some serious thinking. Professor Ruth Langer, who teaches at Boston College, recently pointed out that "[o]ne of the problems in our world is that people don't know how to be constructively self-criticial. The traditional categories of sin [to which the Yom Kippur liturgy clearly points] help us make this move [to constructive self-criticism]. One of the things that distinguishes and makes Judaism beautiful is that we have an ideal to strive toward, but we're also not punished for falling short of it. What we are expected to do is to keep reaching toward it, and to do that requires the ability to look at oneself and enter an honest process of self-evaluation. To label one's shortcomings as 'sin' is thus a necessary and positive part of a process of growing."

This is what we are doing today. Measuring ourselves against a plumb line of the truth, we are growing. God knows, whatever our particular sins of commission and omission, contemporary culture conditions our souls towards resentment, impatience, selfishness, unkindness. Today, with God's help and our own effort, we grow towards gratitude, patience, compassion, kindness.

The two haftarot which we read tomorrow are clear enough in their guidance. In the morning, Isaiah reminds us of the kind of fast which God desires: that we share our resources, leave no one without food and shelter. And then, tomorrow afternoon, we hear the story of Jonah. For centuries, our sages have reminded us that we read the whole Book of Jonah tomorrow afternoon in order to appreciate that not one of us "can fly away from God."

In his best seller of 1956, The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm suggested that the story of Jonah comes to teach us about love. "Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love," he wrote. "Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love. . . . God has told Jonah to go to Ninevah to warn its inhabitants that they will be punished unless they mend their evil ways. Jonah runs away from his mission because he is afraid that the people of Nineveh will repent and that God will forgive them. He is a man with a strong sense of order and law, but without love." His active concern is for himself.

In Jonah's attempt to escape, suggests Fromm, "he finds himself in the belly of a whale, symbolizing the state of isolation and imprisonment which his lack of love and solidarity has brought upon him. God saves him, and Jonah goes to Nineveh where he preaches to the inhabitants as God [originally] wanted, and the very thing Jonah was afraid of happens. The people of Nineveh repent their sin, mend their ways, God forgives them and decides not to destroy the city.

"Jonah is intensely angry and disappointed; he wanted 'justice' to be done, not mercy. At last he finds some comfort in the shade of a tree which God has made to grow for him to protect him from the sun. But when God makes the tree wilt, Jonah is depressed and angrily complains. God answers: 'You had no pity on the tree which you did not make and which protected you. And should I not spare Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than six score thousand people who cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle.'"

God's answer to Jonah, Fromm concludes, is "that the essence of love is to labor for something and to make something grow; that love and labor are inseparable. One loves that for which one labors and one labors for that which one loves." Jonah lacked compassion, not only for the people and cattle of Nineveh but also for the tree which God had made to provide him shade.

This day, we are reminded that there is nowhere we can hide from a divine judgment that ultimately abides. We are reminded to choose to love that for which we labor and labor for that which we love. Is this not what we are about these days as Jews?

Here we are tonight, in this sanctuary whose physical beauty our ancestors and we have created out of our labor of love. Here we are tonight, in this sanctuary, with no need to flee divine judgment because it is here that we can be, and ever more become, the persons we are called to be.

The resonance of our love and our labor rings true here at OZ. We recently began a process of visioning and planning which we call Tikveh 2020, our hope for the next decade and beyond. Tikveh 2020 is our response to our need for more intentional synagogue leadership on the part of more and more of our members. Tikveh 2020 is a challenge for us to love that for which we labor and to labor for that which we love.

I urge you, on this Yom Kippur, to consider the ways in which you can participate increasingly in shaping who we are as a community, helping to define our vision, our mission, our goals and ultimately our action. Much thanks to those of you who participated in Tikveh 2020's parlor meetings. Your insight is shaping our visioning and planning, helping us to take a very honest look at who we are, who we can be, and how we can get there.

Whether or not you were at a parlor meeting, we hope you will attend the Tikveh 2020 workshops scheduled for December 8th and January 20th. Tikveh 2020 is a unique opportunity for many of us-all of us on staff and many members of the congregation, to concentrate our energy at Ohavi Zedek, so that we can be a congregation which reflects a deep love of Judaism; so that we can deepen our resolve to be a synagogue that transmits such love and commitment to our children; so that Judaism not only survives but thrives.

And today, Yom Kippur, this Day of Atonement--this is the time, for each of us, to commit to labor for the truth of who we are. As Jonah discovered, in the end, there is no hiding from this truth. The gift of our tradition is the space of these hours to stop fleeing from what we allow ourselves to know this these hours as our responsibility; to stand the ground of our own existence; to allow what God always sees, to enter our hearts and heal our souls.

So what does this mean for you and me? How can each of us, very concretely, commit ourselves this Yom Kippur to transform ourselves and our congregation? How do we turn words into a new reality?

We are decent people, struggling to make sense in a world in which the sins of violence, greed, and selfishness are institutionalized all about us. Yom Kippur comes only once a year; a unique and rare opportunity for us to come to grips with the ways in which we are implicated in the disorders of our time. May we have the courage to confess our sin to God and ourselves; regret such weakness; and commit to new ways of living.

As we enter this special day together in this sanctuary of Ohavi Zedek Synagogue, may we keep in mind the precious counsel of the Baal Shem Tov:

"Sorrow locks the gates of Heaven.
Prayer opens locked gates.
Joy has the power to tear down the walls."

"Light is sown for the righteous; joy for the upright of heart. May Yom Kippur be for you personally a day of light and joy, ushering in a year of light and joy for all of us together here in this sanctuary of Ohavi Zedek Synagogue.

Good yontov.

Yom Kippur Morning 5769

Mah norah ha'makom ha'zeh,
Mah norah ha'makom ha'zeh.
How awesome is this place.

Good yontov. I hope you had a restful night and that the hours of this day are going well for you. What does it mean for Yom Kippur to go well? The answer is very personal. What we do have in common is that each of us lives in a tough world. The strains on us are greater than we often allow ourselves to recognize.

Of course we make mistakes. Torah records that human beings began to sin as soon as we became a species. Not only is our sin rooted in our earliest days; our tendency to place blame for our mistakes goes back to our first days in the garden.

Blame is the excuse of resentment and bitterness. Excuses are always a waste of time; all the more so, on this Day of Atonement. We only have a limited numbers of hours left today in which to be honest about our mistakes, large and small. Can this Day of Atonement really afford us the opportunity to leave behind our insecurities, our guilt, our resentment, our anger, even our bitterness?

Our sages teach that, for transgressions amongst us, for transgressions between one person and another, atonement requires active effort to seek and to offer forgiveness. For transgressions between each of us and God, Yom Kippur itself does have an atoning power. And we feel this atoning power in as much as we recognize that we have a responsibility actively to reach out to God and ask for forgiveness.

There is no magic involved. There must be a change in our heart. It's one thing to talk about change. It's another to make the changes. The point of this day is that such change in the heart is possible; indeed, that it is necessary if we are to regain a sense of the security that is inherent in our ability to live honestly and freely.

Change in the human heart is grounded in our capacity to forgive. "Forgiveness," Joan Borysenko writes, "means accepting the core of every human being as the same as ourself and giving them the gift of not judging them. You can be clear about whether or not a person's behavior is acceptable without judging the person . . . . Forgiveness starts with ourselves and extends to others. Accepting that the core of your own being is as precious and wonderful as that of any other person is the greatest gift you can ever give yourself."

Forgiveness is not a one day a year activity. How well we do on Yom Kippur is conditioned by our spiritual practice during the rest of the year. Yet it is just as true that the measure of our honest reckoning on Yom Kippur affects how well we do during the rest of the year. Since today is Yom Kippur, we may as well start now.

A good place to begin is to reflect carefully on the ways, consciously and unconsciously, that our heart tends towards resentment, and how our heart can be softened by gratitude. I mean, deep inside. When we look hard enough, with God's help, we can identify the source of the sore points in our heart by observing what it is in others that pushes our buttons.

As Joan Borysenko writes, we can be honest with others about our differences without being judgmental. We can be critical without being punishing. It begins with not being judgmental about ourselves; not being punishing of ourselves. These kinds of distinctions-between honesty and judgment; between criticism and punishment-are helpful to recognize on a day like this.

Recognizing the ways in which we are judgmental and punishing is the first step. Acting upon such insight requires a lot of spiritual practice. Perhaps if we connect our insight into the ways that we are unfair to ourselves and others-if we connect this insight to Yom Kippur, we can hold onto this insight through the year, not just intellectually but emotionally, spiritually as well.

Our tradition offers many ways to help us. For me, the experience of daily minyan and Shabbat reminds me through the year of the lessons of Yom Kippur. I also depend on the music of the classical Hasidim who found spiritual delight in the repetition of melodies, niggunim. We live in a time of great creativity in this regard, with any number of our contemporaries creating new melodies. We were fortunate enough a few years back to share a Shabbat with Rabbi David Zeller, alav ha'shalom.

During the past few months, as anyone who has spent any time with me can testify, I have been drawn to a melody which Rabbi Shefa Gold wrote for words of our ancestor Jacob which I mentioned on Rosh Hashanah.

Mah nora ha'makom ha'zeh,
how awesome is this place.

Wherever I am, in good mood or bad, I endeavor to remember Shefa Gold's melody and these words. It was a delight, with Robert Resnik, to share them down at the boat house on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.

Mah nora, ha'makom ha'zeh.
Mah nora, ha'makom ha'zeh.

Sometimes I lose the melody, and finding it brings me back to the lesson being taught. Being human, our hearts need to be trained to let go of feeling sorry for ourselves. We need to be reminded to be grateful for simply being alive, here, now, in this place. Whatever the place: how awesome it is! Remember Sharansky in his jailor's office, Chanukah wax dripping on the fine wood.

It's not easy to gain such an attitude; to rise above resentments, great and small. Most of us try to make this effort, in a variety of ways which we are not accustomed to looking upon as the spiritual practices that they are. Since I was about ten and my European born grandfather gave me a guitar, I've learned folk music through which I tried to lift up my heart in song. To be honest (especially as I've come to understand this music as a form of spiritual practice), there lingered in my singing discordant notes of narcissism. Sometimes I was singing true; other times, I was blowing my own horn. The goal of spiritual practice is to recognize that our simply being alive is a gift from God.

You are familiar with a variety of spiritual practices with which you have engaged over the years. Many of them are physical. Running, swimming, walking are activities that provide both physical conditioning and exercise of the soul.

Thirty years ago, at a tough time in my life, not long before I discovered morning minyan, I would get up before dawn and run a three mile circuit, up and down suburban hills. Later, here in Burlington, I would walk early in the morning in Burlington's Intervale.

There is a sacred connection between our bodies and our souls. Part of the pain that comes with aging is losing the capacity to continue to exercise physically. To her great chagrin, at the age of 93, my mother sometimes cannot get out of bed. And some days she is capable of walking from the east side to the west, and then downtown a couple of miles. It's a concession to take the bus home.

Not all physical exercise that conditions the soul requires a great deal of movement. A year ago this past spring, I began the physical activity of carving wood. I've always enjoyed walking in the woods. Growing up on the concrete of Manhattan, I yearned for trees and rocks. For years as I walked in the woods, I collected pieces of wood that I picked up. They all went into a far corner of our garage.

Then last spring I began to work with the wood, at first using a set of chisels I had brought home to try to encourage my son Ari to carve; then continuing with tools sent to me by my old friend Carl Lipkin-the gauges used by his father, the sculptor Jacob Lipkin. I was encouraged by my friend Karl Sklar, who graciously offered suggestions, taught me about wood, and eventually mounted and installed some pieces for a show. Murray Edelstein taught me about chisels and gauges, kept them sharpened and has done his best to show me how to keep ten fingers in place. I'm grateful to a number of you who are now bringing me roots and pieces of wood that you have collected over the years.

The first piece of wood with which I worked was the root of a ceder bush which Karl Sklar had pulled out of our front lawn with a back hoe. I call it Ashayrah, the name of a tree idol found in ancient Israel to which many Israelites remained loyal even as they worshipped the God of Israel.

I do not see myself carving idols (notwithstanding the one that I made!). On the contrary, my work with wood feeds my relationship with God (the source of my being, if you will). I know that the piece of wood is a husk which once carried life. I am meeting this husk late in its life. Most often it is an isolated piece on the ground; sometimes a dug-up root of a plant. Often the husk has rotted in places; sometimes its texture is punky, often too far gone to earth for me to meet it, in any sense, half-way.

I know that any beauty of the wood with which I engage is mostly the creation of God. Sometimes I hesitate to take my gauge to the wood. What is it, really, that I would be adding? The challenge is a test of my own integrity. I am concerned about the honesty with which I engage the wood. Too often I find myself gauging recklessly as I forget the spirit that guided the growth of the wood in the first place, and now reminds me (when I'm paying attention-in Hebrew, placing heart) to meet the wood with compassion.

Quite literally, I daven better, I pray with greater kavanah, greater intention, for my carving of wood. The very simple act of tapping a gauge into wood channels my emotions in ways that free my heart of resentment, condition it towards acceptance.

Mah nora ha'makom ha'zeh,
Mah nora ha'makom ha'zeh.

How awesome is this place, Jacob exclaimed when he awoke from his dream. This place where we are alive; this is none other than the home of God.

This is the consciousness that we seek this Day of Atonement. This is the consciousness that we seek every day.
Can Yom Kippur really afford us the opportunity to leave behind our guilt, our resentment, our anger, even our bitterness? Can we emerge from Yom Kippur, forgiving ourselves and each other, grateful that we live in the home of God?

Of course we can. "It is enough"-this is Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotz speaking, the Kotzker rebbe-"It is enough to open your heart the smallest amount-even the width of a pin head-to repent, so that you feel a prick in your heart, like a piercing sting in living tissue, not like a needle thrust into dead flesh."

To which we can add the words of Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg-who amongst us can ignore the wisdom of a person called Shmelke?-

"If I had the choice, I would rather not die. Because in the World-to-Come there are no Days of Awe, what can a person's soul do without the Day of Atonement? What is the point of living without Repentance?"

G'mar hatimah tovah, may each of us be sealed in the Book of Life for a year of recognizing the glory simply being alive.

Why not? If not now, when?

G'mar hatimah tovah, may each of us be sealed in the Book of Life for a year of grateful living.

Good yontov.