As If It’s All Happening on An Airplane: Vulnerability and the High Holy Days

I believe there are some of you here who are in the dating world, hoping to meet someone special.  I thought of you when I read a recent column by Emma Court in the NY Times called, “A Millenial’s Guide to Kissing.”

It begins: “When a total stranger kissed me under the artificial lights of an airplane cabin somewhere above international waters, my first thought was of the Orthodox woman sitting to my left…The kiss, coming out of nowhere, had turned me into the heroine of a bad romance novel: heart fluttering…those blue fleece blankets had never been so sexy….Between us sprang the kind of instant intimacy fostered by open personalities in tight quarters. We spoke in spurts of our trips and what we had done during the days spent in Israel…

[Once back on the ground], I hugged him a brisk no-nonsense goodbye. We didn’t exchange numbers…… Would things have been different, if one of us had had the courage, to say something other than goodbye before heading to our trains? I only realized later why it had been such an oddly familiar feeling: My generation treats every liaison as if it is happening on an airplane. Our story wasn’t so different, after all. I wonder what we collectively lose as we try so hard not to care. We pretend that it doesn’t matter, that we have time, that because we are young we are invulnerable.” 

Crowd Sourcing Sermon for August 28

What is the point of being in touch with our vulnerability, as Jews are pushed to do during the High Holy Day season?

Encountering the High Holy Day Prayer Book

On Rosh HaShanah it is written;

On the Fast of Yom Kippur it is sealed…

Who will live and who will die;

Who will reach the ripeness of age,

Who will be taken before their time;

Who by fire and who by water…

Who by earthquake and who by plague…

Who will rest and who will wander;

Who will be tranquil and who will be troubled…

I sat in shul for years reading these words before I realized the answer. The answer to each of these questions is “me.” Who will live and who will die? I will. Who at their end and who not at their end? Me. Like every human being, when I die it will be at the right time, and it will also be too soon. Fire, water, earthquake, plague? In my lifetime, I’ve been scorched and drowned, shaken and burdened, wandering and at rest, tranquil and troubled. That has been my life’s journey.

Of course I prefer to deflect this truth. I would much prefer to let the prayers talk about someone else, perhaps the fellow in the next row. It has taken a lifetime to reveal that defense as a lie. The prayer is not about someone else. It’s about me. It is a frightfully succinct summary of my existence. So now I read it again, but in the first person, and it makes me shiver.

I will live and I will die, at the right time and before my time,

I will wander but I might yet find rest,

I will be troubled but I may achieve tranquility.

This is the central truth of the High Holy Days. This is what makes them Yamin Nora’im, days of terror. We are vulnerable.

-Rabbi Edward Feinstein (page 206 Mishkan Hanefesh)

Crowd Sourcing Sermon for August 21

“On the Jewish High Holy Days, should we be praying mostly for the Jewish people, or for all humankind?”

One of the innovations of the Reform Movement’s new High Holy Day Prayerbook is in the “Kaddish” and in the prayer “Oseh Shalom,” we pray for peace “on us and on all Israel” (al kol Israel), but we add “on all who dwell on earth” (al kol yoshvei teivel).  [Mishkan HaNefefesh, p. 70 and p. 90].

 

Crowd Sourcing Sermon for August 14

“How can we use the month of Elul to prepare to turn the wrongs we have done into merits?”

[From Mishkan HaNefesh, Yom Kippur service, new Reform High Holy Day prayer book, page 85]:

“The Talmud teaches: ‘Great is repentance, for it transforms one’s deliberate sins into merit’ (Talmud, Yoma 86b).  In general, we think of repentance as a way of achieving expiation for the wrongs we have done.  But the Talmud’s teaching points us in a new and surprising direction…The focus is not on changing the past, but in defining a new direction for the future.  For repentance, after all, is ultimately about changing ourselves and evolving morally.”

Our Common Home: The Pope’s Encyclical in the Jewish Community

by Rabbi Jill Maderer

So… Who is in the box?  Who’s home falls in the Center City travel box when our special guest, the Pope, visits Philadelphia this fall? Me, too.  Although still not complete, this week’s transportation and security update began to feed my hunger for a better understanding about how my family will function, how emergencies will be addressed, and of course, how we are going to get the Jewish community to synagogue.  As complicated as the Pope’s visit will be from a logistical perspective, I am intrigued about how we in the Jewish community, might find meaning in this historical moment.

Crowd Sourcing Topic for Sermon on August 7

Torah reading: Deut 10:12-14

What does the Pope’s encyclical mean for the Jewish community?

 

Text :

The morning wind forever blows,

the poem of creation is uninterrupted;

but few are the ears

that hear it.

by Henry David Thoreau, in Mishkan Hanefesh Rosh Hashanah prayerbook, p. 145

Why I am going to Susiya | Rebecca Strober | The Blogs | The Times of Israel

Why I am going to Susiya | Rebecca Strober | The Blogs | The Times of Israel.

(Rebecca is the daughter of Fred Strober and grew up at RS)