torah

ON GOD’S MOUNTAIN, THERE IS VISION: Sermon for Rosh Ha-Shanah Morning, 5787

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Delivered September 12, 2026, Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

He found himself staring into the sky: moments before, blue as a daydream, now thick with smoke and ash. It flooded his nostrils, seared his throat, stung his eyes. He willed his arms to move but found them bound to his side. His body had gone to stone. Every muscle froze except his eyes which darted back and forth in search of a face. His vision blurred in the haze. The sky turned red and black, sheets of fire and soot, floating down, rising up in plumes, smoldering embers scattered on the ground, the glint of metal piercing the air, the ringing in his ears, the fear that pinned him down.

This he knew: if he ever made it out of this alive, nothing would ever be the same.

He heard a voice. It sounded like father muttering to himself, talking himself down the way mother did when father was being headstrong, impatient, impervious to reason. “Abraham, Abraham.” The knife clattered to the ground. Father’s fists unclenched. Isaac’s stayed balled up, a knot of tendon, muscle, and bone.

He remained immobilized, bound in place, eyes closed tight, ears straining to stifle the sound – father’s footfalls crunching this way and that, a high shrieking noise, desperate and inhuman, that seemed to go on for hours, and then nothing. Nothing, but a still, small voice, a low murmuring sound. Father breathing, slow and heavy.

Isaac blinked his stinging eyes and squinted to survey the ruin: the broken stones and fuming cinders, the blood soaking into the gravel, the smell of the ram upon the altar, its mangled body turning black as it went up into the sky as a burnt offering, father low to the ground, hunched over, the wreckage of a man.

They would not walk on together after this. How could they?

They stood together for a moment, father and son, atop Mount Moriah. Before turning his back and trudging off, Abraham would give this place a new name, this ground zero where, in a few terrible hours, everything changed.

וַיִּקְרָ֧א אַבְרָהָ֛ם שֵֽׁם־הַמָּק֥וֹם הַה֖וּא יְהֹוָ֣ה ׀ יִרְאֶ֑ה אֲשֶׁר֙ יֵאָמֵ֣ר הַיּ֔וֹם בְּהַ֥ר יְהֹוָ֖ה יֵרָאֶֽה׃

Abraham named that site Adonai-yireh – the place where God sees – of which it is said, even today, “On God’s mountain there is vision” (Gen. 22:14).

Adonai yireh, the place where God sees. 

Today, on this Rosh Ha-Shanah morning that marks the 25th yahrzeit of 9/11, and nearly three years since October 7th, we try to see; we look back with Jewish eyes.

Today we undertake a “spiritual eye exam”: not to test our eyesight, but to examine what we’ve chosen to look at, and what we’ve closed our eyes to. What, since 9/11, have we failed to see? And what, since October 7th, might we choose to envision differently? How, especially now, might we move from Moriah – the mountain of trauma – to Adonai-yireh, the vista of vision? How can we transform suffering to seeing, wound to witness?

Three days after 9/11, at Friday night services, a hundred members of our WRT community came up to the bimah to bensch gomel, the tradition of reciting a prayer for those who’ve survived a brush with death. Some of you were there, had seen it all and lived to tell: the fire and the ash; the towers disintegrating into heaps of twisted metal and shards of glass; the bodies, broken and plummeting. Paralysis was momentary. Unbound from Ground Zero, that unholy altar, survivors picked themselves up and began to run, block after block, through smoke and debris.

And we witnessed along with them, on our TV screens, these images none of us can ever unsee. We saw this as well: the feet of first responders surging into the flames, hands sifting through the rubble; the posters of the missing; the strangers turned supporters; the flags and banners on the balconies, the city that refused to surrender to fear. On 9/11 we saw the worst of humanity; in the hours and days that followed we saw the very best.

And yet much, still, we did not see, not clearly, not at the time. We may have heard reports of cheers erupting from East Jerusalem and the West Bank, of candy strewn across the streets of Gaza City and Nablus, presaging the gleeful scenes immediately following the butchery and kidnappings of October 7th. But we failed to see how the masterminds of 9/11 rooted their rationale in a seething, unquenchable hatred of the Jews.

The fires at Ground Zero were still burning when the old conspiracy theories began to spread like wildfire: the same tropes recycled across centuries of European history, repackaged by the Nazis and the Soviets, that Jews control governments, finance, and media; that Israel manipulates world events.

Bin Laden said as much himself. In his 2002 “Letter to America” justifying 9/11, he rails against “the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.” The antisemitism is not incidental; it’s structural.

And it is the connective tissue between 9/11 and 10/7. The 1988 charter of Hamas opens by quoting the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” It goes on to cite, as evidence, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious Russian forgery published in 1903 as “proof” of a Jewish plot to rule the world. On October 7th, Hamas did what its charter promised: it murdered and maimed Jews in the name of God, and launched a war not only against the State of Israel as a political entity, but against the Jews as a People.

The language did not evolve between 9/11 and 10/7 because it didn’t have to. Jews control money, media, and governments; the destruction of Israel is a divine imperative. The same conspiracy theories, the same theological claims, have been there all along. 

But our eyes did not clearly see the antisemitism at the heart of jihadism: an ideology that is neither synonymous with Islam nor shared by the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims, but that is deadly when wielded by well-funded, armed, and organized fundamentalists.

And we did not teach our children to recognize it.  

Thunderstruck by 9/11, most of us who lived through it inadvertently did what trauma survivors tend to do: avoid bringing up memories that re-inflict pain and anxiety, and, especially, avoid inflicting what we felt on our children and grandchildren. Nevertheless we failed to teach a generation to recognize the ideological vocabulary of jihadism and its inherent strain of antisemitism – and were consequently shocked when that vocabulary, that virus, reappeared, seemingly everywhere, in forms we should have recognized.

Like those of you who came up to the bimah after 9/11, Isaac himself survived a near brush with death. He may have come down from Mount Moriah to tell the tale; the ram may have gone to its sacrificial death in his place; but Isaac would never again be the same.

Torah depicts the grown-up Isaac as quiet, passive, aloof. How could anyone have the words for such an unspeakable trauma? After the Akedah, his binding and near-sacrifice, Isaac lives a life estranged from his father and family of origin. In older age, Isaac goes blind. A perceptive midrash proposes that when Abraham raised the knife above his throat, the angels wept, and their burning tears fell into Isaac’s eyes, precipitating his eventual blindness (Bereshit Rabbah 65:10).

We too have fallen victim to post-traumatic blindness. There are the things we did not see about our enemies. But there are also the things we did not see about ourselves: failures not so much of seeing, then, but of vision.

9/11 shattered Americans’ trust in the basic promise of safety and invincibility from foreign terror, much the same way that October 7th shattered Israelis’ – and world Jewry’s – confidence that never again was, more or less, a fait accompli. Here in the States, sixty years after Pearl Harbor, we took it as an article of faith that a large-scale attack on American soil was a thing of the past. Pre-October 7th Israel surely understood better the threat of foreign attack, and yet found itself totally unprepared for a mass-scale invasion from Gaza.

Trauma makes every society yearn for guarantees of safety. Just forty-five days after 9/11, Congress approved vastly expanded government surveillance powers. Following October 7th, the Knesset approved similar emergency provisions. These measures promised protection while exacting steep costs in personal liberty and privacy.  This in turn has emboldened those with ulterior motives to exploit those measures for antidemocratic ends.

The world we live in today – from the procedures we willingly, if uncomfortably, accept at airports and, yes, especially, synagogues, to the capture of our online activity that we routinely shrug off as a feature of living in the age of “big data” – is fully a post-9/11, post-October-7th reality. We made our choices, mind you, not blindly, but simply doing the best with what we had at the time.

The current Israeli and American military campaigns against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime reflect a hard-won clarity about the threats these forces pose.  Their willingness to carry out more 9/11s and more October 7ths is sufficient rationale to declare jihadism a persistent and intolerable threat to the West.

But there’s a difference between seeing and vision. You can see a problem clearly, name the harm it causes, and still lack the vision to deal with it effectively. One long-term response to 9/11 – 20 years of US military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan – was premised on the idea that we could remake the Middle East through overwhelming use of force and a relative paucity of political planning and sustained diplomacy. Israel and the US may well be living a version of the same lesson in Gaza and Iran right now.

Rosh Ha-Shanah, the new year, invites us to grapple with substantive questions. In what, and in whom, do we put our faith? What are the limits of firepower and surveillance in dealing with our adversaries?  When will we earnestly reckon with the limits of strength and the necessity of imagination?

We see more clearly today that wars may be won or lost on the field of combat, but the much harder task of winning the peace – of imagining, building, and sustaining a durable peace – is one that happens only through the work of negotiation and compromise, sacrifice and mutual accountability.

A century ago, well before the establishment of the State of Israel, Religious Zionists debated exactly this matter: how to achieve enduring Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral homeland – seeing that military force would be necessary to subdue our enemies – while also acknowledging that military force alone could never sustain Jewish statehood, long-term. 

Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, who would later become Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, wrote an essay way back in 1929, when violent skirmishes between Arabs and Jews erupted in the Holy Land. It is called “The Sword and the Book.”

“Truly,” he wrote, “the Holy One never likes wars. On the contrary, SHALOM is God’s name…. [T]he war against the sword is fought by the book.… The book of paper and parchment will endure longer than all the swords made from many kinds of metal;… all will be beaten and scattered to the wind, and the book shall reign alone” (Amiel, “The Sword and the Book,” Derashot El Ami volume 3, Ha-Ivri, Jerusalem, 1929, as cited in Chaim Seidler-Feller, “A Zionism for the Future,” Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, Fall/Winter 2025).

The exercise of raw power does not constitute a vision for lasting peace and prosperity.  War is, at best, a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Encouragingly, political imagination and moral vision are ingrained in our heritage, both as Jews and as Americans. Two hundred fifty years ago, the Framers of American independence appealed to “unalienable rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” insisting that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Seventy-eight years ago, the Israeli Declaration of Independence affirmed that the Jewish spirit found first expression in “the eternal Book of Books,” and that the newborn State of Israel would “be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants….”

We stand now on a precipice, seeing the way in which the traumas of 9/11 and 10/7 have molded our present reality, but still impaired when it comes to a vision of American and Jewish destiny about which we can feel both physically secure and morally proud.

What would this vision require of us?  

What security arrangements would be necessary?

What political arrangements?

What obligations on the part of Palestinians?

What on the part of Israelis?

What accountability should be expected, and how would it be enforced?

This Rosh Ha-Shanah – twenty-five years after 9/11, three years after October 7th, 7 ½ months after the last hostage came home from Gaza – let’s come down from the mountain of trauma, turn away from our blindness, toward seeing, and, ultimately, to vision. Turn from the sword, and pick up the Book. Or, if we must – given the painful reality of this moment in Jewish history – hold the sword in one hand and the book in the other.  

There is, it turns out, a message still waiting for us in our Book of Books.  For if you want to know whether healing is possible after Moriah, don’t take my word for it:  Torah tells us where Isaac went. 

He never did return to the mountain. Shaken and alone, estranged from father and family, Isaac eventually made his way somewhere else.

We next meet Isaac two full chapters and many years after the Akedah.  He has relocated to an oasis in the Negev called Be’er Lahai Ro’i, meaning, The Well of the Living One Who Sees Me (Gen. 24:62).  

This is Hagar’s well. The well named by the Egyptian maidservant who lived in Isaac’s childhood home, the mother of his estranged brother Ishmael, the woman whose progeny would give rise — both sacred Jewish and sacred Muslim traditions hold — to the Arab peoples of the land, the woman who fled that same household in her own anguish, the only woman in the entire Torah to give God a name of her own: El Ro’i, the God Who Sees Me (Gen. 16:13-14). 

The mountain of trauma bears Abraham’s name for God.  The well of healing bears the name given by Hagar. 

And Isaac — bound, scarred, bewildered — left the mountain and chose the well. 

It was there, lifting his eyes, that Isaac saw a caravan approaching, bearing Rebecca; there, that she lifted her eyes and saw him; there that he loved, and there that he was comforted (Gen. 24:63-67).  The survivor of the altar made his home at the living well of being seen.   

We need to find our way home to that same well.  The well of healing and strength that we Americans found in one another after 9/11.  That we Jews, that we as a WRT family, found in one another after October 7th.  That we feel when we hold and are held in our times of loss and grief, when we experience human connection and the blessing of community. 

I earnestly hope we can find our way to the kind of seeing we managed in those terrible and beautiful days after 9/11, when we, in our collective hurt, our collective need to hold and be held, were able to see past every difference, across color and creed, political party and point of view, and simply see one another. 

Torah offers us a glimpse of this. When Abraham died, Isaac and Ishmael, the estranged sons of Sarah and Hagar, stood side by side and buried their father together (Gen. 25:9). 

I earnestly hope that we, too, will some day find a way to that vision, where the traumatized children of Abraham and Sarah, and the traumatized children of Abraham and Hagar – the Jewish children of Isaac, and the Muslim children of Ishmael – will see one another in our shared humanity, our shared hurt, our shared hope, and live side by side, at long last, by the Well of the Living One Who Sees.  

I do not know if we can see that far.  

But, by God, we can lift our eyes, and try.

Shanah Tovah. 

Persistence in Resistance to Tyranny: Sermon for Shabbat Va’era, 5786

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Delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

Friday, January 16, 2026

Shabbat Shalom!

My remarks tonight take up the theme of “persistence in resistance to tyranny” and are composed in line with what the 20th-century Christian theologian (and outspoken critic of the Nazis) Karl Barth once said: that “a sermon should have the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.”  

Wherever you get your news—and I hope you’re getting it from as many different and credible sources as you can—one could easily conclude that we live in unprecedented times, for the sheer volume and diversity of soul-wrenching issues before us.  How, then, to choose among this week’s headlines alone, from Mississippi to Minnesota to Iran?  I could take up any one in depth and keep you here until Tu Bishevat or, try something novel: take up all of them together and make my point in 10 minutes.  You will be relieved to learn that I have endeavored in the direction of the latter.

I begin with a challenge to my own claim that we are living in unprecedented times, a statement which, given the nature of time and change, could be accurately claimed at any moment in human history.  But I refute it in the spirit of Kohelet, whose opening chapter of the Book also known as Ecclesiastes, memorably records:

Only that shall happen

That has happened,

Only that occur

That has occurred;

There is nothing new

Beneath the sun!

(Eccl. 1:9)

“Nothing new beneath the sun,” indeed.  For what we witness this week—from Mississippi to Minnesota to Iran—has been seen before, and that takes us to the verses we have heard from the Torah reading for this Shabbat, Parashat Va’era.  To set the stage, Va’era marks the stunning turning point in the narrative of Israelite bondage, when God responds to the suffering of the slaves and, with Moses as messenger, begins their liberation.

To Moses God declares, “Say, therefore, to the Israelites: I am Adonai. I will deliver you from the hardship of the Egyptians and save you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary judgments.  I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God….  I will bring you to the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and give it to you for an inheritance, I, Adonai” (Ex. 6:5-8).

It is what happens immediately after this inspirational charge that particularly interests us now:  

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר מֹשֶׁ֛ה כֵּ֖ן אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְלֹ֤א שָֽׁמְעוּ֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה׃

“But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by brutal slavery.”  Or, literally, “they would not listen to Moses, out of shortness of breath and brutal slavery.” (Ex. 6:9).  Tyranny takes your breath away.  It suffocates the body and stifles the spirit.  

Consider what this passage teaches us about the natural response of people to oppression and brutality; the effect on body and breath, flesh and spirit, of trauma and terror, whether brought upon human beings by literal tyrants, or lone wolf terrorists, or states acting with unrestricted power to menace the weak with not only the threat but also the use of violence against the defenseless.  

In a sense, the arsonist who incinerated a Reform Temple with its Torah scrolls in Jackson, Mississippi, the arsonist who tried the same in this week in Germany, the armed ICE officers who have maimed and killed civilians, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guardsmen who mowed down protesters by the thousands on the other side of the world, may have acted from starkly different motivations in different settings and circumstances, but the intended effect on their victims, and on us who sympathize with their victims, is one and the same:  to make it impossible to breathe.  To crush not just body but spirit.

Moreover, we learn from Torah—in the very next verse—that the effect is often contagious, afflicting not just the masses but also their Moses.  “The Israelites would not listen to me,” he says to God in panic; “how then should Pharaoh heed me, me—who gets tongue-tied!” (Ibid, v. 10)  

This, too, strikes a chord as old as time: even leaders, in the face of unrelenting brutality, may, for a time, lose heart, lose hope, lose their way.  It happened to Moses.  It happened, it seems important to note on this weekend of all weekends, to MLK.  In his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, King recounts a personal crisis during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in January 1956, after receiving a late-night threatening phone call amid ongoing violence and intimidation. Sitting alone at his kitchen table, King poured out his despair:

“I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

In some sermons where he retold this experience, he phrased it similarly: “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right… But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now, I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. Now, I am afraid… And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.”  It’s a mutually reinforcing cycle of despair.  That’s what tyranny does to the spirit, to freedom movements everywhere. 

King’s hour of despair had its own precedents: Moses, of course, but also Frederick Douglass, who spoke of his brutal treatment under the slave-breaker Edward Covey:

“Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), p. 63)

After the 1892 lynching of three close friends in Memphis, and facing death threats that forced her to flee to the North, the great activist and journalist Ida B. Wells Barnett said:  “I felt like one banished from home and friends… The shock was so great that for weeks I could neither eat nor sleep.”  In her diaries, Wells recounts periods of deep discouragement and loneliness in her solitary quest, feeling the burden of apathy and inadequate support from the Black community and allies.  

“There is nothing new under the sun.”

Of course the Torah portion, and, moreover, the Jewish story, does not end with Moses in retreat or defeat.  Because our God does not back down from a setback; does not give up in the face of human error and evil, no matter how great or how grave.  Our God does something extraordinary in the next verse:  God summons for Moses a lifeline:  Aaron, his brother, his mouthpiece, his ally and supporter. He adds breath to the short of breath.  God reminds Moses—and us—that in the face of terror and tyranny, we never need go it alone, no matter how lonely the work may feel.  And so, arm in arm, and breath adding to breath, the brothers press on, and the great and violent confrontation with Pharaoh begins that will, by the end of next week’s portion, lead to liberation.

I read today’s passage and think about the passage of time and travail for our people and for hurting people everywhere.  People short of breath and crushed in spirit.  I wonder what this passage meant to the Jews living in Babylonian exile, or under Roman occupation, to our ancestors expelled from Spain or forced into the ghettoes and the camps.  

I wonder, too, what message this passage might offer us, in today’s frightening America, in this strange and fractured world that has just crossed over the threshold of 2026 to welcome a year shrouded in anxiety and uncertainty.

I wonder, and I remember that, through it all, ours is a God who does not give up on humanity, and that we are a people who don’t give up on God’s children, either.

Shabbat Shalom

Shemini 5784: Reflections on 20+ Years at WRT

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I’m speechless!

…Not literally, of course.  I have a speech….

(Never trust a rabbi who claims to be speechless.)

You have blessed me tonight so generously, so now it’s my turn to bless you.

The model for blessing the congregation appears in this week’s portion, Shemini:

“Aaron lifted his hands toward the people and blessed them.”  He offered the requisite sacrifices, “and then Moses and Aaron went inside the Tent of Meeting.  When they came out, they blessed the people; and the Divine Presence appeared to all the people” (Leviticus 9:22-23).

The Rabbis, always attuned to the nuances of the text, observed a few peculiarities in the space of these two verses:  the repetition of the blessing; the fact that Aaron blesses alone at the outset and then is joined by Moses; the brief and unexplained interlude when Moses and Aaron walk into the Tent; their immediate re-emergence to bless the people a second time.

I have thought a lot about this passage in the days and weeks leading up to this celebration.  

Specifically, three thoughts come to mind, each evident from this passage, and each increasingly evident over my years at WRT. 

  • First, that it is not good to go it alone.      
  • Second, that something important happens inside the Tent of Meeting.
  • Third, that we’re supposed to be doing here is taking the blessing out of the Tent and into the world.

People often ask me, “Do you ever get nervous up there on the bimah?”

And I say, “No, not really.” 

And that’s because I never have to do this alone.  

I get to do this with the best people in the world.  From the minute I arrived at WRT I have gotten to do this alongside the greatest cantors and rabbis, with world-class musicians and teachers of Torah, and each of us has each other’s back.  From the original “Dream Team” of Rick Jacobs, Angela Buchdahl, and Stephen Merkel of blessed memory, to the Dream Team of 2024, I have always felt so lucky to lead with a team.

The Torah comments twice on the subject of “going it alone,” and both times it uses the phrase “Lo Tov,” “not good.”  First, in the Garden of Eden, of the first human being, Adam, about whom it is written, Lo Tov heyot adam l’vado, “It is not good for a person to be alone” (Genesis 2:18).  And so the human is given a partner, an equal, a complement: Chava, meaning life.

Later the Torah presents us with a young Moses, a Moses still finding his way in the wilderness, leading a community out of bondage, when his father-in-law Jethro observes him managing all matters for the congregation, big and small, and warns that if he keeps it up, Moses is going to burn out fast.  Jethro says:  “Lo Tov ha-davar asher ata oseh, The thing you are doing is not good.  Get yourself some help” (Exodus 18:17-23). 

It is not good to go it alone.

Which makes me wonder about Aaron, at the top of the verse, standing up there in front of the people, all alone, administering the rituals—alone; blessing the people—alone; and I like to think that this lonely Aaron suddenly remembered that it is not good to go it alone, which explains what happens next:  he and Moses walk into the Tent of Meeting together, and then re-emerge together in front of the people.

I am blessed that I have never had to go it alone at WRT.  Clergy, professional, and lay partners have provided boundless support, insight, wisdom, leadership, caring: sometimes taking the melody line and sometimes the harmony, all contributing to the symphony of WRT.  

My heart swells with gratitude for all who have shared the mantle of leadership—and especially to my clergy partner, Amanda Kleinman, whose cantorate encompasses the totality of congregational service, from strategic planning to the cultivation of the next generation of leaders, from preaching and teaching to carrying our people in times of celebration and sorrow, and whose friendship, and patience (especially with me!) have sustained my spirit on hard days, and who exemplifies the perfect mix of taking the work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.  

And who, by the way, planned this whole shebango—not single-handedly, of course, but whose vision, teamwork, and attention to detail are finely engraved in this beautiful Shabbat.  Amanda, it is a pleasure and an honor to lead with you, and to learn leadership with you and from you.

Amy Rossberg, who oversees congregant relations and pastoral care, holds our community with love and deep Jewish spirituality.  Hers is often the first voice offering mazal tov or sympathy.  I really don’t know where I’d be without her—probably lost on my way to a cemetery in Queens.  I am so grateful. 

Without Eli Kornreich at the helm of all of our operations—logistical, financial, and physical—the house of WRT could not stand.  And without our volunteer leaders, the house of WRT would be hollow.  Warren Haber, you exemplify dedication not only to WRT but to the Jewish people and the Jewish tradition, inspiring our entire community.  With you as Temple President, we should all feel blessed to know that we never have to go it alone.

I come from a family that centered joyful, Jewish living in our home and our hearts.  I have been blessed to be part of a family that includes my parents, my sister, and her family, including her husband Jonas and his family, my nephew Samson (who chanted Torah like a boss tonight!) and twin niece and nephew Shirah and Jakey, and their father Dean, and many others who are with me tonight, either in the sanctuary, or online, or in spirit, or in memory.   

Friends of the highest human caliber have given so much happiness and meaning to my life.  What a thrill to have some of my closest childhood friends here, and four of my five college roommates who have been making one another laugh until it hurts for almost 33 years, usually at James’s expense (he’s the roommate who correctly surmised that a ski trip would be better than a Shabbat service).  You all mean the world to me.  And I have been blessed by the immense caring and wisdom of my chavruta, my rabbinic study-partner, teacher, and friend Rabbi Jan Katzew.

At the heart of it all is Kelly, whose dedication to WRT deserves a celebration all her own.  Kelly has shared the leadership of this congregation in ways both overt—co-chairing WRT’s efforts to resettle refugees from Africa, preparing yontif meals for staff, lending her glorious voice to concerts and special services, co-leading congregational trips to Israel, basically, just being the “very model of the modern major rebbetzin”—and, covert: as teammate, truth-teller, logician, strategic adviser, sermon-editor, spiritual guide, cat mom, and above all, best friend.  You have sacrificed long days and sleepless nights for this congregation with the same integrity, love, and devotion that you give to the performing arts, including your present work in the national tour of Girl from the North Country, the extraordinary musical featuring the music of Bob Dylan that experienced a critically acclaimed Broadway run before it was cut short by Covid.  You can visit northcountrytour.com to follow her ongoing journey, resuming in Dallas next week.  

(And yes, the irony of Kelly singing 20 Dylan songs every day, eight shows a week, is not lost on us, given the fact that, of the handful of things about which we do not agree, the appeal of Bob Dylan’s voice is foremost among them.)

Kelly, thank you for being the first half of “Team McBlake”; thank you for all you give to this community; thank you for loving me, of all people; I love you.

So Aaron walks into the Tent of Meeting, not alone this time, but with his partner by his side, and then they re-emerge.  The text doesn’t tell us what happened inside that Tent but clearly, something has changed, because as soon as they step outside, they bless the community, and, for the first time in the Book of Leviticus, the Divine Presence makes itself known to all the people.

This, I think, is the magic of the synagogue.  You go in one way and you come out different.  Something transformative happens inside this Tent, something marvelous.  

You go in thinking, “my children will get a Jewish education,” or “my kids will get a Bar or Bat Mitzvah,” or, “I need someone to conduct my loved one’s funeral,” and what you discover is that inside the Tent, the world makes a little more sense.  The ancient Sages conveyed wisdom that still matters in our lives.  There is more to life than I realized.  There exists a place where I am less lonely.  My simchas and my sorrows have a place where I can hold them, honor them, and re-enter the community, transformed.  A place exists where—I can’t exactly put my finger on it, and I may not use this language for it, but for lack of a better way of putting it, inside the Tent, I felt as if I were in the presence of God.  Did my beliefs change?  Maybe; maybe not.  But I definitely changed.  My sense of priorities, my sense of purpose–they changed.  My life changed.

Besides. The point of Judaism never was to inculcate belief in God, anyway.  The point of Judaism is to make God’s presence known in the world, which is why Moses and Aaron have to come out of the Tent in order to bring the blessing and the Divine Presence to the world. 

The point of Judaism is to live in such a way that gives hope and testimony to the possibility that in a world of dross, beauty is possible. That in a world of hurt, love is possible. That in a world of randomness and disorder, reason and order are possible. 

So as I mark this milestone, I celebrate the way in which we, right here at WRT, have brought the blessing out from the Tent and into the world.  

I rejoice when I hear that other congregations are singing a melody that was first sung here.  

I rejoice when other congregations follow our lead and transform their environmental impact through the Zero Waste initiative that we developed, in this Tent.  

I rejoice when WRT’s engagement strategies, adult education initiatives, and creative holiday observances are emulated across the Reform Movement. 

I rejoice when we travel to Israel and are greeted not as tourists but as “B’nei Bayit” — members of one’s home and family.  

I rejoice when a guest at Shabbat or the Holidays comes up to the bimah afterwards and says, “I’ve never been to a prayer experience like this before.”

I rejoice when I see people walk out of the sanctuary and remember that the parking lot is holy ground, too, and remember that they learned derekh eretz, common courtesy, dignified decency, menschlichkeit, here in the Tent.

I rejoice when the Tikkun Olam values we teach in the Tent–the dignity of every human being, the need to cultivate multi-faith allies and friendships in a world that has no trouble generating enemies of the Jewish People, the centrality of Israel to us–are all made real in our work outside the Tent.

I rejoice when our congregants embrace, outside this Tent, the notion that standing up for Israel is not at odds with supporting the dignity of Palestinian people; that Jewish strength is not to be achieved through isolationism or extremism.

I rejoice when I learn, as I did just this week, that a young woman who grew up here at WRT was accepted to HUC and will be entering rabbinical school in Jerusalem this summer; that the leaders who began their journeys here at WRT are now serving as great leaders of Jewish people across the country and across the world.    

So this is my blessing to you, WRT:  

Please continue to bless one another as you have blessed me.  Please show one another the kindness, understanding, compassion and forgiveness that you have shown me.  And please be as good and generous to this synagogue as you have been to me.     

Please don’t leave the magic inside the Tent.  

The world needs you to bring the blessing out from here, to reveal the Divine Presence to all of God’s children.

Shabat Shalom