Yom Shilishi, Tuesday

I'm fevershly getting ready for this Shabbat and Yom Kippur. I've decided to speak about my passion for Israel on Kol Nidre and I'm in the process right now of putting words to paper (or keys to keyboard, so to speak.) I've already put together outlines for Kol Nidre, YK morning, afternoon, and evening.

One addition to the t'fillot this year that I'm adding at the suggestion of a veteran of the Yom Kippur War is a section that marks the 30th anniversary of the war. Thirty years ago Israel was attacked on all sides: Her very ability to survive was at stake. Over 2,500 people lost their lives to save the country.

What follows here is the addition to the Yom Kippur service that I will be doing around the time of Yizkor, the memorial service:

On October 6, 1973 — Yom Kippur Egypt and Syria opened a coordinated surprise attack against Israel. The equivalent of the total forces of NATO in Europe were mobilized on Israel's borders. On the Golan Heights , approximately 180 Israeli tanks faced an onslaught of 1,400 Syrian tanks. Along the Suez Canal, fewer than 500 Israeli defenders were attacked by 80,000 Egyptians.

Golda Meir addressed her shocked nation:

Citizens of Israel,

Shortly before two pm today, the armies of Egypt and Syria opened an offensive against Israel, launching a series of air, armoured and artillery attacks in Sinai and on the Golan Heights. The Israel Defense Forces have entered the fight, and are beating back the assault. The enemy has suffered grave losses.

The rulers of Egypt and Syria have long planned this violation of the cease-fire. Contemptibly, the aggressors are now spreading the falsehood that it was Israel that opened fire. But the responsibility for the renewal of the fighting and for the bloodshed lies with them alone.

Our enemies had hoped to surprise the citizens of Israel on the Day of Atonement, when so many of our people are fasting and worshipping in the synagogues. The aggressors thought that on this day we would not be ready to fight back. We were not caught by surprise.

For several days now our Intelligence Services have been aware that the armies of Egypt and Syria were preparing a joint offensive. Israel Defense Force patrols established that large armed forces were massed in offensive deployment in the vicinity of the Suez Canal and on the Golan Heights. The reports of the patrols confirmed the information already in our hands. Our forces were placed in position to meet the danger.

We are in no doubt that we shall prevail, but we are also convinced that this renewal of Egyptian and Syrian aggression is an act of madness. We did our best to prevent the outbreak. We appealed to quarters with political influence to use it in order to frustrate this infamous move of the Egyptian and Syrian leaders. While there was still time we informed friendly countries of the confirmed information that we had of the plans for an offensive against Israel. We called on them to do the utmost to prevent war, but the Egyptian and Syrian attack has started.

The Israel Defense Forces are ready to repel the enemy's attack. Early this morning a partial call-up of reserves was approved and got under way.

In view of the gravity of the information, I was obliged to call a meeting of the Cabinet on the Day of Atonement. The offensive started while the Cabinet was in session. The Cabinet authorized the IDF to take all action on the battlefront required by the situation to achieve victory. Ministers were authorized to issue the necessary emergency orders.

This is not the first time that we have been compelled to endure ordeal by battle. I am confident that none among us will fall prey to panic. The mobilization will no doubt cause hardships and interference in the normal course of life and work but we must try to accept these difficulties as we have done in the past, with full understanding. We are called upon to demonstrate responsibility and discipline in our conduct. We must be ready for every burden and sacrifice needed for the defense of our survival, our freedom and our independence. Let us, then, conduct ourselves so as to be worthy of our soldiers of Israel who are valiantly doing their duty in the air, in the armoured forces, on the ships, in the artillery, in all units and services in the outposts, in the villages and settlements, along the lines of fire in all sectors.

We have full confidence in the spirit and the strength of the IDF to overcome the enemy. The victory of the IDF is our certain assurance of life and peace. We pause on this Yom Kippur to note the 30th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and the meaning of the sacrifice made by those young soldiers, for the most part men in their late teens, twenties and thirties. Two thousand five hundred and twenty-three died.

__________


Many of us were children—or not even born-- when the war began on Yom Kippur of 5734/1973. They have no personal memory of that awesome and awful day. the casualties of the Yom Kippur War did not die in vain. The carnage of that war led the Egyptians and the Israelis to a negotiated settlement that has lasted more than two decades, despite all of the tensions in the area. Indeed, if we have any hope for peace today, it is the direct result of the forces set in motion by the battles of 1973.

We need to remember our fallen, not just for their sake, but also for ours. In our travails today, we need to learn the lessons of their courage and to emulate their sense of personal responsibility for the fate of the Jewish people. In a different war and in a different country, Abraham Lincoln so unforgettably expressed the reciprocal relationship between fallen soldiers and those who honor their memory. In the Gettysburg Address he said: "from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."

And so we remember them:

David's lament for Saul and Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:17-27).

And David intoned this dirge over Saul and his son Jonathan—He ordered the Judites to be taught The Song of the Bow. It is recorded in the Book of Jashar:

Your glory, O Israel,
Lies slain on your heights;
How have the mighty fallen!
Tell it not in Gath,
Do not proclaim it in the streets of Ashkelon,
Lest the daughters of the Philistine rejoice,
Lest the daughters of the uncircumcised exult.

O hills of Gilboa—
Let there be no dew or rain on you,
Or bountiful fields,
For there the shield of warriors lay rejected,
The shield of Saul,
Polished with oil no more.

From the blood of slain,
From the fat of warriors---
The bow of Jonathan
Never turned back;
The sword of Saul
Never withdrew empty.

Saul and Jonathan,
Beloved and cherished,
Never parted
In life or in death!
They were swifter than eagles,
They were stronger than lions!

Daughters of Israel,
Weep over Saul,
Who clothed you in crimson and finery,
Who decked your robes with jewels of gold.

How have the mighty fallen
In the thick of battle—
Jonathan, slain on your heights!
I grieve for you,
My brother Jonathan,
You were most dear to me.
Your love was wonderful to me.
More than the love of women.

How the mighty have fallen,
The weapons of war perished!


The following poem was written by Israeli poet Raya Hernick after her son Guni (of blessed memory) was killed in the Lebanon War.

Then at night he came to me
the boy who was never born
he looked in my eyes
and asked
"Where is my father?"

His eyes were
your eyes my son and the angle
of his brow was yours
and mine. And the boy asked
"where is my father?!"

Your father, my boy, was carried in the winds
of the mountain. In a foreign land
your father remained, my boy.
Somebody made a mistake. My beautiful boy
and now you will never be.

"Where is my father" asks the boy
who was not born
where is my son asks the mother
who has no more life
where am I asks the man
who remained on the peak of the mountain."

Yom Shani, Monday, the day after Rosh HaShana

I survived...and even prospered at my first try at leading Rosh HaShana t'fillot in Bremerton. The congregation is quite wonderful.

Here are the two sermons that I gave, one on Friday night and one on Saturday.

The first is called "Rosh HaShanah: A Break in Time"


Does it matter?

It matters.

“It” is each of our lives.

“It” is how we live our lives.

“It” is the opportunity for change, the opportunity for t’shuva.

“It” is our relationship to God and how we cultivate this relationship.

“It” is what you do RIGHT NOW.

That is what Rosh HaShanah is about.

It is a big deal.

Rosh HaShanah gives each of us is the opportunity to contemplate our lives because Rosh HaShanah is about life. We start our new year by embracing life, by expressing gratitude for our life, and by asking that we may be written in the Book of Life for good in the year to come. There is much to celebrate.

The new year marks time—but not the way we mark time on December 31 with parties and maybe watching the ball drop in Times Square to wake up the next day for the Rose Parade and abundant football.

For Jews, our new year, Rosh Hashana, marks time at the same time that it creates a break in time.

It is a time to break us out of the rhythm of our daily lives.

For as we cherish life, and celebrate the new,

we break out of our complacency, setting aside time for introspection about our lives.

We break out of the ordinary for t’shuva, for turning.

We break out of our own world to think about our relationships to each other. . .and to God.


This is a break that is meant to be abrupt: it shakes us into
remembering what is important in life, that our lives are a gift and that as time passes, we need to remember.

It is a break that gives us time to remind ourselves that life is precious and our lives matter—to us, and to God.

It matters.

Beginning tonight and over the next ten days we have the opportunity to do what’s called in Hebrew a heshbon nefesh: taking an account of one’s soul. Think of it as an inventory, a private inventory of each of our lives.

The process of hesbon nefesh is an individual one, done in community. For even as each of us takes our hesbhon nefesh, our private inventory, we are not alone, because each of us, the people who make up this community, along with Jews everywhere, are on this path together.

So how do we do it? How do we review the past year, our deeds, misdeeds, and missed opportunities? Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to ask questions.

Ask yourself: where am I in my life?

Is it where I want to be?

Have I missed the mark?

In what ways would changing parts of my life make it better?

More holy?

In what ways can I improve my relationships with those I love?

How can I bring my values into my work?

How can I treat my parents better?

How can I have more patience with my children?

How have I done on my Jewish journey?

Have I continued on it?

Have I grown in my prayer life?

Have I nurtured my relationship with God?

Daunting questions. . .but none of us is asking them is isolation, alone.

We gather here at Beth Hatikvah as a community engaged in an intensively personal process.

Taking a hesbon nefesh is hard work, but remember: There is ultimate meaning in what we do. God cares. We face not an unfathomable universe in which human striving meets with cosmic indifference, but a power concerned with human action and with moral meaning. The world is not an unformed void chaos, but a place of meaning and responsibility. Belief in God offers us a sense that our lives matter- and that God remembers.

And to complement your hesbon nefesh, do something concrete over the next ten days, especially if it’s something you’ve been meaning to get to and just haven’t.

Tell someone how you feel about that person: don’t save it for later. We want the new year to be sweet and one way to start sweet is to make sure we’re up to date with the people who are important to us.

Visit an elderly friend or relative and take them out…for coffee, for a walk in the park, for a visit in your home. None of our elders should have to live out their lives in loneliness.

Do something special with your children. Take time to talk to them about what’s going on in their worlds; make one-on-one time.

Commit to that volunteer opportunity like the food pantry, the tutoring program or the many opportunities here at the shul. There’s always compelling excuses why we don’t have time or energy to get involved, but on the flip side there’s also never enough people to give their time, energy and skill to actively improve our community and our world.



Whatever you do, make it something that is an active step in the direction of how you will live your life in the year to come, a reflection of the work you are doing on your hesbon nefesh.


Tonight when we greet each other after services we can say: "May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year." The book of life is open, and starting tonight each of us has the opportunity to be sealed for good. Now that the book is open, we can ask that it not only be written, but sealed for good.

Remember us unto life, we pray, O King who delights in life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life, for Your sake, O God of life.



The second is called "Counting Your Blessings and Making Your Blessings Count":

Ah-choo.

When’s the last time that you blessed someone?

For most people it’s when we’ve heard someone sneeze. “Bless You” or the famous “gezundeit” is said to the sneezer by the sneezee; the sneezer usually says thanks to that.

What’s that all about? Random strangers blessing other people? If you search the ‘net you’ll find dozens of answers for this practice such as early superstition about the soul to sneezing being a precursor to a more dangerous disease.

Today the standardized responses of "Bless you!" or "God bless!" imparts little other than a message of acknowledgement. It is an ordinary politeness; One says "Bless you!" not as a conscious act of blessing, but because it is expected, not out of concern for the wellbeing of the sneezer's soul or heart. We do it because we've been taught this is an obligatory response whose omission would seem glaring. We "bless" out of a desire to be perceived as polite.

Even more disturbing is when blessings are viewed as some form of consolation prize. You know, those times when something less than wonderful happens and someone says “well, at least you can count your blessings that. . .”.

Blessings are neither something to sneeze at, nor are they a consolation prize: they are the unique way that we as Jews acknowledge the many gifts in our lives that we receive from God and in so doing elevate how we live our lives, from ordinary to extraordinary, from taking what and who is around us for granted to celebrating the unique gifts that attend to each of us daily.

We must count our blessings and make our blessings count.




By counting our blessings, how can we elevate our lives from ordinary to extraordinary?

Let’s start by waking up in the morning. As you stumble to your first cup of coffee, you gradually wake-up and become aware of your surroundings and your life. The hustle and bustle of the morning become a race to get to school or work on time.

But what if. . .

What if before you went to make the coffee you began the day with two morning blessings:

First for health:

Blessed are you, God, Ruler of the Universe, who heals all creatures and performs wonders.

Second for soul: Blessed are you, God, Ruler of the Universe, who restores me to a new day of life (who restores life to dead bodies).

What an outstanding way to begin a day: when you get up, you take ten seconds to say two blessings, first expressing gratitude for the gift of health from which all blessings follow and then the gift of another day, something not to take for granted, but to realize that it is one more special opportunity to make something of our lives. And for those among us who are struggling with health or spiritual issues, these blessings offer the opportunity to reaffirm faith, even when it may be a personal struggle.

To bless at the beginning of each day is to give each day special meaning. And it’s the opportunity to live your life as fully as possible, cognizant of the blessing of health and spiritual well being.

From an ordinary to an extraordinary start of the day.


Blessings have another powerful affect: living actively. That is how we make our blessings count.

Let me explain using something near and dear to our hearts and stomachs: food and eating.

Just as beginning the day is an acknowledgement, so is beginning each meal with blessing. We acknowledge that our food came from someplace, that this great creation of God, the earth, provided sustenance for our needs.

Our blessing takes an act we must do for our survival, eating, and elevates it to an act of consciousness, that not only are we eating because we have to, but that food is available to us.

We bookend our eating with another blessing, birkat ha mazon. Here we cite the passage from Torah: “You will eat and you will be satisfied and you will bless your God.”

Thus, we eat and we count our blessing. We make our blessings count when we take this consciousness, this awareness, and remember even with this abundance, hunger persists: not all people have the food the need, not all people eat until they are satisfied. Indeed, this morning I read in the paper that nearly 11% of the people living in Washington State are living below the poverty line. These are not people far away from us, but our neighbors, right here in front of us…there are people who may eat and not be satisfied because there’s not enough money for food. Not in some far away place, but right here.

Making our blessings count means expanding them to others. If there are people going hungry, our blessings remind us that it is up to us to perform the mitzvah of making sure that another human being can be fed. We can pick-up an extra can of something at the store, volunteer at the food bank, help out at the homeless shelter on Thanksgiving.

Thus, we COUNT our blessings that God has provided food from the Earth and that we have ate and been satisfied; we make our blessings COUNT by expanding them to others, by filling hungry bodies.

Each one of you is uniquely empowered to bless, to see your world through blessings, to make your lives more meaningful and make every moment count.

And just as the Jewish tradition offers many forms for blessing, you can create your own blessings. What is important is that blessing becomes integral to your being—that you make your blessings count because you are elevating your life and living it actively.

These Days of Awe give us time on the calendar for self-reflection…by blessing, you have mini-opportunities each and every day for reflection and enriching your life and the lives of others with meaning.

By doing so, you will be abundantly blessed just as you, too, have been generous in your blessings. You will see your world through new eyes, and you will have the opportunity to live on a more conscious plane.

And so a blessing:

Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheyno melech haolam, lasok b’divrei Torah: Blessed are you, Adonai our God, who makes us busy in Torah.

Yom Hamishi, Thursday

A terrible week for the Jewish people, for the State of Israel. Israel targets terrorists, Hamas kills civilians. Here's one editorial take on it from the Jerusalem Post. I may be in Los Angeles, but my heart beats with the people of Israel (note: Cafe Hillel was one of my regular hangouts in the spring).

Editorial: Enough

Sep. 10, 2003

The world will not help us; we must help ourselves. We must kill as many of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders as possible, as quickly possible, while minimizing collateral damage, but not letting that damage stop us. And we must kill Yasser Arafat, because the world leaves us no alternative.

No one seriously argues with the fact that Arafat was preventing Mahmoud Abbas, the prime minister he appointed, from combating terrorism, to the extent that was willing to do so. Almost no one seriously disputes that Abbas on whom Israel, the US, and Europe had placed all their bets failed primarily because Arafat retained control of much of the security apparatus, and that Arafat wanted him to fail.

The new prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, clearly will fare no better, since he, if anything, has been trying to garner more power for Arafat, not less.
Under these circumstances, the idea of exiling Arafat is gaining currency, but the standard objection is that he will be as much or more of a problem when free to travel the world than he is locked up in Ramallah.

If only three countries Britain, France, and Germany joined the US in a total boycott of Arafat this would not be the case. If these countries did not speak with Arafat, it would not matter much who did, and however much a local Palestinian leader would claim to consult with Arafat, his power would be gone.

But such a boycott will not happen. Only now, after more than 800 Israelis have died in three years of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, has Europe finally decided that Hamas is a terrorist organization. How much longer will it take before it cuts off Arafat? Yet Israel cannot accept a situation in which Arafat blocks any Palestinian break with terrorism, whether from here or in exile. Therefore, we are at another point in our history at which the diplomatic risks of defending ourselves are exceeded by the risks of not doing so.

Such was the case in the Six Day War, when Israel was forced to launch a preemptive attack or accept destruction. And when Menachem Begin decided to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. And when Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield in Palestinian cities after the Passover Massacre of 2002.
In each case, Israel tried every fashion of restraint, every plea to the international community to take action that would avoid the need for "extreme" measures, all to no avail.
When the breaking point arrives, there is no point in taking half-measures. If we are going to be condemned in any case, we might as well do it right.

Arafat's death at Israel's hands would not radicalize Arab opposition to Israel; just the opposite. The current jihad against us is being fueled by the perception that Israel is blocked from taking decisive action to defend itself.

Arafat's survival and power are a test of the proposition that it is possible to pursue a cause through terror and not have that cause rejected by the international community. Killing Arafat, more than any other act, would demonstrate that the tool of terror is unacceptable, even against Israel, even in the name of a Palestinian state.
Arafat does not just stand for terror, he stands for the refusal to make peace with Israel under any circumstances and within any borders.

In this respect, there is no distinction, beyond the tactical, between him and Hamas. Europe's refusal to utterly reject him condemns Palestinians, no less than Israelis, to endless war and dooms the possibility of the two-state solution the world claims to seek.

While the prospect of a Palestinian power vacuum is feared by some, the worst of all worlds is what exists now: Terrorists attack Israel at will under the umbrella of legitimacy provided by Arafat. Hamas would not be able to fill a post-Arafat vacuum; on the contrary, Hamas would lose the cover it has today.

A word must be said here about the most common claim made by those who would not isolate Arafat, let alone kill him: that he is the elected leader of the Palestinian people. Even if Arafat was chosen in a truly free election (when does his term end?), which we would dispute, this does not close the question of his legitimacy.

Whom the Palestinians choose to lead them is none of our business, provided it is a free choice, and provided they do not opt for leaders who choose terror and aggression. So long as the Palestinians choose such a leadership, it should be held no more immune to counterattack by Israel than the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were by the United States.

We complain that a double standard is applied to us, and it is. But we cannot complain when we apply that double standard to ourselves. Arafat's survival, under our watchful eyes, is living testimony to our tolerance of that double standard. If we want another standard to be applied, we must begin by applying it ou