Sermons from 2024 High Holidays
I had the opportunity to share words of Torah and comfort in my communities at the high holidays and wanted to put them in a more public space as well.
Yom Kippur 2024 Dvar Torah - Elisha Gechter
Eight days ago I stood in the middle of this room leading our community in tefillah, feeling swept up in the powerful words and melodies unique to the Yamim Noraim. But I’m also so moved by the part of the service that we sing on our regular shabbat gatherings - the words of the torah service stir me and I try to sing them extra slowly on our auspicious days. I was so caught up in them this year, davening with my eyes closed, my mind on the current state of the world and the deep need for our tefillot, that I ended up making a mistake. Maybe you caught it, probably you didn’t - it was one letter off but it changed the meaning for me. It came after the first paragraph of Ein Kamocha - having just said words where we exalt God as eternal, incomparable and state that God will give strength to our people and will bless us with peace. My mouth was next supposed to say “AV Harachamim,” Father of Mercy, but instead I said “AZ Harachamim” - IF you give us strength and blessing only THEN you will be considered merciful. This mistake not only shifted the meaning to a less gendered tefillah, but it made it a conditional tefillah. I smiled at myself in that moment as I try to be kind to myself around mistakes, and take care with self-talk, but then it hit me that there was something in that mistake that reflects the way that many people are feeling right now, which is torn between emotions. Between sadness and hope, between hate and love. Between feeling sure about praising God and being unsure or even angry. At this tender spot in our calendar and our hearts it’s not just the day of atonement but the week we marked a year since Oct 7. So no wonder that we’re continuing to experience mixed emotions that leave us feeling unsure about ourselves and our world.
I want to offer us several ways to possibly think about dealing with feeling torn or imbalanced at this moment. Mostly I’m sharing things that I’ve recently found to be inspiring, and maybe they will be helpful to you too.
This week Rabbi Avi Killip, Executive Vice President at Hadar in NY, shared her Rosh Hashana sermon on MyJewishLearning.com in an article entitled “Praying for Permission” and she gets at this notion of vacillating;
“I want permission to spend some time this holiday season thinking about my own life — my failures and goals, and how I might change and grow this year, even when my struggles feel small compared to the things I could be praying about. I want permission to sometimes forget about those bigger things and focus only on my own small life. And I want permission to not focus on myself this year. I want permission to say that teshuvah might be too small a framework for the challenges of this moment.”
This push and pull of how big and messed up the world is feeling right now, with the knowledge that our own internal lives are also big and full and yes, messy, reminds me of pulling two white paper tabs from the golden contraption at Lehrhaus, our local Tavern for Jewish learning. One says bishvili nivra haolam - for me the world was created, and the other says ani kaafar vefer - I am but dust and ashes. This is in homage to the Chasidic Reb Simcha Bunem who always carried two slips of paper with him with these quotes, one in each pocket, in order to live a balanced life. Rabbi Shai Held, Dean of Hadar, in his new book Judaism is about Love talks about actively balancing these ideas - balancing a sense of humility with knowing our worth. I’m not sure our liturgy today is the best about helping us with such balance. I have spoken here before about the second set of viduy that I recite on Yom Kippur that my Rabbi, Avi Weiss, wrote that are all positive, listing the wonderful things we have done in the last year like Ahavnu, we have loved, Berachnu, we have blessed. I feel that this addition helps me stay more balanced today. Shai Held emphasizes that knowing our positive qualities and abilities isn't arrogance but rather is self awareness and notes that
“The desire to change and do better depends on a robust sense of self-worth. Many people who engage in introspection assume that what it means to work on ourselves is to dwell incessantly on our flaws. But to probe our shortcomings…is only HALF of what is required - and to be conscious only of our shortcomings is a prescription for failure and despondency...Woe to the person who is unaware of their shortcomings because they will not know what to work on, but even greater woe to a person who is unaware of their virtues because they don’t even know what they have to work with.”
If that is true year round, today we should also be striving for balance between dwelling on our mistakes, and on our merits. If you’re not someone who has spent much time recently thinking about your strengths, I’d humbly suggest using part of tefillah today to consider your virtues, naming for yourself what you like about yourself, what you know you bring to the world, even, or especially, in everyday interactions. And if that feels hard to name, maybe ask someone in this room who knows you for some help - especially if they are someone you asked for forgiveness on the approach to this holiday. As much as we tell people we’re in proximity with what they can be doing better, we should tell people what they are getting right and leave them feeling acknowledged so they can better understand how they show up for other people.
But making an inventory of our own merits to compliment the other things we focus on today, may lead us to consider another addendum needed to our Yom Kippur tefillot/conversations. And that is thinking about where God has fallen short. And if God isn’t what grounds you today or ever, I invite you to replace that with a word or concept that works for your view. And I don’t think that would be heretical, certainly not this year.
There is precedence for such an accounting in a Chasidic tale which describes the practice of a simple pious Jewish tavern owner. Every eve of Rosh Hashanah, (let’s say she) would sit down to do an accounting of the business and of her life in 2 separate books - one for her own actions—where she had achieved or missed the mark over the past year and a second book for God's actions—the blessings as well as the sufferings endured by her family and community.
The very first time the tavern owner completed her entries in her own book, she added up the total of her sins and she felt ashamed: she had been quick to anger, forgot to check on her elderly aunt, and she didn’t express gratitude to her customers. Then, she opened the second book and when she looked at everything she felt God had done wrong in the past year, that part of the list wasn’t short either: her crops had failed, the tavern business suffered, her family faced illness, and misfortune had come to her community.
In a rush of inspiration she lifted both books and spoke directly to God:
“Ribbono shel Olam (Master of the Universe), I see that both You and I have made many mistakes this past year. I have committed sins, and You have given hardships. Let’s make a deal. I will forgive You for all the troubles and misfortunes You have given me this year IF You forgive me for all my wrongdoings. We’ll just wipe both accounts clean and start fresh in the new year.” And with that she swung the books over her head as kapparot (attonement) and threw them into her fireplace.
Rabbi Eliana Jacobowitz of Temple Bnai Brith in Somerville recently shared a reference to this story on facebook along with an alternate version of Mi Sheana that she was inspired to write this year. The traditional version translates to “who answered” and is a piyut we sang last night enumerating all the times in our history God answered those who called out for help. Her version is made up of stanzas of Mi Shelo Ana - who did not answer, and recounts the times in history when God did not answer us. In explaining her motivation to do so she said “There is something powerful and healing in going to the place that is angry with God and demanding a better present and a better future. The place of sadness and grief is a helpless place, and this year we need to reclaim our agency…I hope you will find this version empowering and hope-giving and that it will be received with love and rachamim by God.” I’ll share 2 of them with you;
מִי שֶׁלֹּא עָנָה לְחַנָּה סֶנֶשׁ בְּבֵית הָאֲסוּרִים, הוּא יַעֲנֶנּוּ
May the one who did not answer Hannah Senesh in prison, answer us.
מִי שֶׁלֹּא עָנָה לִילָדֵינוּ בְּפֶסְטִיבַל הַנּוֹבָה, הוּא יַעֲנֶנּוּ
May the one who did not answer our children at the Nova Festival, answer us.
So far I’ve quoted ideas that encourage us to allow contrasting emotions to complement one another - to balance each other out, to lead us to something more complete; our sins and our merits, our greatness and our humility, our anger and our hope, our shortcomings and God’s. But what about integration? Is there a way to bring together the 2 slips of paper that Reb Bunim kept in his pocket?
Rabbi Toba Spitzer of Dorshei Tzedek in Newton who wrote a beautiful book this year called God is Here - Reimagining the Divine which I highly recommend as a tool for spiritual direction - wrote something for a past Yom Kippur Dvar Torah about this
“Most of us… fall somewhere between these two pockets, sometimes knowing that the world was created for my sake, sometimes feeling like dust and ashes. It is good to move back and forth between the two pockets… perhaps best of all is to experience both at the same time…We can spend Yom Kippur seeking that integration, trying to cultivate both of these qualities within ourselves.”
OK but how, Rabbi Toba doesn’t tell us. She invites us into our own process. Integration is a very personal thing that doesn’t come with a recipe. And sometimes instructions or words can fall short. Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, Dean of Hebrew College, sent a pre Rosh Hashana email in which she shared that
“There is a Hasidic teaching of Rebbe Nachman.
He said, ‘When two people speak simultaneously, there is dissonance.
But when they sing together, there is harmony.’
When the world loses its ethical compass, it needs beauty to recalibrate.
When words fail, what is left to us but to sing?”
I want to suggest that the songs we use today might be an access point to integrating that which we feel is in tension in ourselves and in the world.
Between sadness and hope, between anger and love. If we’ve dwelt too long on one emotion or the other, in one pocket or the other, it’s not too late to sing ourselves back from that place.
I used a tune last week that is an old Chassidisuh niggun that I learned with words from Joey Newcomb - you fall down you get back up. It’s a powerful reminder to not stay stuck and that falling down happens often.
On this day of atonement how can we achieve at-one-ment?
Looking back on this year,
We have made mistakes
And we have watched many others make mistakes
On a grand scale
On a small scale
And we have made wonderful moments happen as well
We have wrote alternate forms of prayer
We have articulated gratitude
We have shown up for each other
We have tried to see many sides of ourselves and of situations
So, may it be a year going forward of BOTH AND
May it be a year where we give ourselves permission
May it be a year where we sing ourselves and others into kindness
Into balance
Into integration
Gmar Tov
Elisha Gechter
Shmini Atzeret 2024
When I was in 1st grade my class of 60 kids in SAR, a modern orthodox day school in NY, dressed in matching white tops and blue bottoms with paper crowns on our heads. We held our brand new siddurim with felted covers designed by us, singing tefillot for a crowd of smiling parents. My school called this production a “siddur play” and it was a milestone to mark receiving our first siddur. What I remember most was the entenmann's donuts we all got to eat afterwards. Now as a parent, I’ve attended similar events each year at JCDS. I love that they call them “milestones” and they have a slightly different flare. Yes I get to watch my children dance and sing, but also they teach midrashim they have created, share powerpoints, posters and dioramas that showcase questions they are grappling with in collaboration with their teachers. These milestones mark their love of learning in a communal and deeply personal way.
I want to offer several ways of thinking about milestones generally and the milestone that today marks particularly.
The word milestone has come to mean many things; a literal roadside marker that lists the distance to a particular location,
a significant event in one’s life, like graduating from school, getting a job, or starting a family, a specific point within a project, a developmental achievement of a skills that tracks human growth such as taking a first step, and they can also be anniversaries of occasions, happy or sad.
So if these all count as milestones, how do we prepare for one? Sometimes we use ritual to mark the moment - since a milestone is a social construct, we also have agreed on norms around how we mark them and make them feel significant. But what happens when we have no script, or when the process of trying to create one feels overwhelming?
I think that’s what was going on for many people leading up to this holiday. Last year people were preparing to celebrate Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, and as they think back on that planning experience they may reflect that it was the last time they felt normal - before their world went to hell on Oct 7. Despite that feeling, people wrote suggestions for how to mark this 1 year milestone. Many are doing so from an Israeli lens where the two holidays of Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah overlap, and call for balancing the joy of Torah dancing with the tragedy of the enormous loss of life. Here in America these two holidays are distinct - so how should we have prepared for this day on its own, and now that we are here, how should we be using it as a day to reflect on this anniversary, this milestone.
Last year on Shmini Atzeret we were in the room below when we started to hear reports of the Oct 7 Hamas attack on Israel. It was scary, almost otherworldly, and without a direct connection to a news source, and given how early it was in the day, we had only slices of information. I had signed up to give the dvar torah that day - before I went up to speak I asked my husband Sam if I should change what I was going to say in light of what we were hearing. He said - we don’t know enough, just stick with your message. Looking back on those words I shared, they still feel relevant;
Shmini Atzeret is a day with contradictions, a day that marks the difficulty of separating from a big experience.
As much as Shmini Atzeret gives us the gift of mindful lingering which we can carry into the rest of the year, I think it can also give us the gift of asking; where else in my life do I need to build in time to frame and mark a transition? Today helps us cap all of Tishrei with ritual and allows us right now to also ask, what am I doing to ritualize other things in my life that are winding down, that are restarting, that are changing?
We’ve struggled this year to process such a big experience - people have worn masking tape on their shorts over their hearts with numbers of days the hostages have been missing, counting up from that tragic overwhelming day. Have we asked where else we should be putting a mile marker - and not just for the bad but for the good we have done for each other this year, even if that has been a struggle to hold onto this year as a war has raged and ravages two peoples. Maybe this milestone feels so fraught because its not at the point where something is winding down.
We read the words of Kohelet in this room last week; “A time to mourn and a time to dance.” We have heard survivors of the Nova festival bravely declare - “We will dance again” but are we ready, is this moment of milestone ripe for perseverance or for brokenheartedness and being ok not being ok?
My friend, artist and fellow minyan goer Josh Meyer shared a Yehuda Amichai poem with me last week that contained some very timely words - in fact they were painted on a sukkah at the Vilna shul by local artist Caron Taub;
A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A person needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history takes years and years to do.
And we haven’t nearly had enough time to digest, as Amichai says, how this year impacts our Jewish history so how could we really plan for this milestone? We don’t have the perspective of much time, and we don’t have a script. This made planning especially hard - but we looked to each other and to our leaders for inspiration, for multiple possible ways forward.
On a play of those words from Kohelet, the Hadar Institute crafted a reader for this milestone called “A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance,” where inspiration can be found and I want to share some of those who specifically address Shmini Atzeret;
In one of the first entries Dr. Renana Ravitzky Pilzer, of Kehillat Shirah Hadashah in Jerusalem writes “The war drums still echo, and the future remains uncertain, but the end of a year of mourning is a Jewishly significant time to pause, and to
shape memory, commemoration, and longing.” One of her colleagues Oshrat Shoham, of Kehillat Hakhel in Jerusalem, states simply “This year, let Shemini Atzeret be a time for reflection and remembering.” Mishael Zion of Kehillat Klausner in Jerusalem adds; “If there is joy on Simhat Torah, it will be joy that emerges from sorrow and mourning. Shemini Atzeret, which the midrash tells us is entirely based on Godʼs desire for “one more day of intimacy” with the Jewish people, is no longer a day of peak closeness and love. It is a wounded day, and any joy that occurs on it must be built from within that wound.”
Living in that space of both woundedness and joy I heard the words of a local yoga teacher Leah Broder I’ve been practicing with at Lotus studios in Somerville; she quoted Christine Valters Paintner, a female monk from NY living in Glasgow who said;
At the heart of autumn’s gift are these twin engines of relinquishing and harvesting
It is a season of paradox that invites us to consider what we are called to release and surrender, and at the same time it invites us to gather in the harvest, to name and celebrate the fruits of the seeds we planted months ago. In holding these two in tension we are reminded that in our letting go we also find abundance.
It can be so hard to let go. To stop planning, to stop controlling how we want to be intentional, how we want to mark any milestone, or this milestone. And while I do appreciate the planning and how thoughtful our greater Camebrville Jewish community has been about what tomorrow will look like, it sometimes feels like it removes the possibility for spontaneity and that attracted me to a Mary Oliver poem that a friend shared online this week called Don’t Hesitate
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches and power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
I want to circle back to the way we think about milestones. Scott Stephens is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's religion and ethics editor. On the anniversary of the 100th episode for the podcast he co-hosts, The Minefield he wrote a piece with Lisa A. Williams on the essence of Milestones. His focus is less about how we should prepare for them and more about how we should grow from them.
Much like the way physical landmarks demarcate meaningful locations, temporal landmarks demarcate meaningful junctures in time. They interpose themselves between the past and a hoped for future. Research in psychology bears this out, by demonstrating that we perceive temporal landmarks, like a decade birthday or New Year's Day, as a division between a past self and the present self who has the future in reach...
But this is not the whole picture. Such a characterisation works when we are talking about milestone achievements, but what about the commemorative or even the evaluative dimension of milestones bound up, say, with the amount of time that has passed since an historically significant or egregious event - like …seventy-five years since the massacre at Babi Yar, or one-hundred years since the start of the First World War?
Such milestones don't mark achievements, but they do arrest the flow of time, even if for a moment, and allow us to give time elapsed a kind of ethical inflection: how have we - as moral agents, as a society, as a community of nations - changed in the interim? Has the passage of time transformed us, or have we squandered it?
Milestones aren't simply goals that we achieve but rather points to which we and our friends - in the fullest moral and political sense - are summoned to return, to revisit, from which to learn and to deepen the quality of our life together, and through which to rededicate ourselves to the pursuit of goals and goods in common that will outlive us. Milestones then are expressions of our common commitments and nurture us along the way.
So perhaps on this Shmini Atzeret we can make headspace to consider which commitments are important to us and how we are doing on those commitments.
On Shmini Atzeret last year I also spoke about Unity. I shared a different reading of the words from the Midrash that Mishael Tzion drew from. My Maharat classmate Rabbanit Leah Fine shared that the Hebrew - “קָשָׁה עָלַי פְּרֵדַתְכֶם” “your separation is hard for me” is not about God and people separating, otherwise it would have said “our separation.” Rather, she says, the Midrash depicts God as eager to have the Jewish people not separate from one another. After a week of togetherness, what’s bothering God, what God is hoping to delay is the threat to our opportunities for unity. “Everyone goes back to their day-to-day, segregated existence… this… is the tragedy that God seeks to postpone by holding onto the unity for one extra day.”
It has certainly been a year of struggling when it comes to unity. Unity doesn’t mean we all do the same thing all the time, it means we make space for how we’re feeling within one community - maybe some of us feel like dancing, maybe some of us don’t but we can still be together. Throughout history when we’ve become deeply divided it has often had negative consequences - from Korach to judicial reform. Maybe one of our deepest commitments could be to find some unity - though not uniformity - at this milestone, and going forward. What would it look like to commit to being in community and conversation with those we deeply differ in opinion from? Rather than shutting each other out or down, what would it look like to stay as open as an Ahron Kodesh during today’s tefilat hageshem?
Chag Sameach.
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