Musings on a Sukkah

So, our backyard sukkah is up and waiting for sundown this Wednesday evening.

When I say "our," I mean more than just Peter and myself.  When we moved to Demarest, New Jersey back in the summer of 2004, we knew we wanted to connect with our neighbors and to our delight there were three adjoining yards (two in the back and one to the side) with other Jewish families.  They all had young children, while we were the empty nesters (barely......).

So, we proposed building one together.  Peter and I supplied the materials, we all pitched in, and our neighbor Alan stores the pieces in his shed. Each year Alan and his kids pass the boards over the fence between our yards. Folks show up with levels and drills.  This past Sunday, with my Mom in from Cleveland adding to the fun, it was up and ready to decorate in 90 minutes. We even paused for a group photo and to sing "Happy Birthday" to Sharon under the sukkah!

The best part is watching the children grow. One year a child will be barely able to hold the hammer and "pretend" to help, and in a blink of an eye she will be drilling a screw into a hinge.  This year Sammy was big enough to scribble a drawing while his twin sisters created detailed sketches of pumpkins. One of his sisters has got it into her head (thanks to a terrific religious school teacher at our temple!) that it is a mitzvah to sleep in the sukkah. She's made it pretty clear that she'll be out there one night soon. So watch out Alan -- rumor has it you're the designated overnight parent!

Sukkot is a time to appreciate the bounties of nature but it is also a time to be grateful that we have a roof over our heads. That's not so for the many homeless families in Bergen County.  I say families, because I'm talking here about the children who don't have backyards to build a sukkah.  They don't have kitchens or bedrooms either.  In 1986 a group of folks got together like our neighborhood friends. They wanted to build something really big.  An organization to help homeless families (many of them working families) get back on their feet and into permanent housing.  They've been doing that for many years now and have helped thousands of people.

This past year the group changed its name to Family Promise of Bergen County.  Our temple will be one of the overnight hosting sites when the new system is up and running in a couple more months. Up to 14 people will be having dinner and sleeping over in classrooms that will be converted into bedrooms for a week this December.  The start-up costs for the new program include buying a van and renovating space at a church in Ridgewood for a day center (with counseling and so much more for the families). Family Promise also runs a free drop in dinner program 365 days a year in Hackensack, helps with transitional housing, a summer day camp for children who are homeless, job counseling, referral services, and so much more.

At Kol Nidre services we announced a fundraiser for Family Promise called: My Family's Sukkot Promise to Family Promise.  In remembrance of when our ancestors did not have a permanent roof over their heads (those forty years living in the wilderness after escaping from slavery in Egypt.....), we asked households to try to donate $36 - double "chai" - to Family Promise.  That was on Friday night. By end of day on Monday, we had over $1000 collected.  Since a generous donor on the Family Promise board issued a matching challenge, that translates into $2000.  And we are still collecting through the end of Sukkot on September 30th.

I'm not planning to spend a night outdoors in our backyard sukkah -- even if the temperature is expected to be summer like the rest of this week.  But when I look out and see a little girls and her daddy in sleeping bags later this week, I'll be thinking of those other children and their mommies and daddies who we have promised to shelter in our temple on their way back to self-sufficiency.

May all the children of the world be sheltered beneath the wings of God's presence, and beneath a roof in a home of their own.

THE GIFT OF FAILURE

THE GIFT OF FAILURE    Second Morning Rosh Hashanah 5771/2010

Sermon given at Temple Beth El of Northern Valley in Closter, NJ last week.  

In 1970, Larry Brilliant – a young man with a medical degree and an eccentric resume - was in an ashram following the teaching of a Hindu Guru. That day in 1970, his  guru called him in and gave him an assignment:  to to Delhi and eradicate smallpox.  when your guru speaks, you listen.  So he takes the bus 17 hours to Delhi and goes to the Health Ministry in full garb – long hair, long robes. You get the picture. And he announces:  I’m here to eradicate smallpox.

Turned away, he takes the bus back to the ashram.  In a few weeks, the guru sends him back to try again.  And  again. And Again. Each time he adjusts a bit.  Cuts his hair; puts on western clothes. The 15^th time – Larry runs into a U.S. worker at from the World Health Organization who just happens to be visiting, and is in charge of smallpox eradication.  He hires him to go out in the field. Larry takes the job as a UN medical officer.   He helps organize the 1500 workers going door to door monthly over a two year period. They find the cases, inoculate all who came in contact, check back each month, and devise new techniques for tracking pandemics. By 1975 the last case of smallpox is recorded in Bangladesh. In 1980, the WHO officially declares that smallpox has been eradicated.

A great accomplishment.  But I share this story because at first, Larry Brilliant failed. 

He failed not once, but 14 times.

As we pray together during these ten days from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, I sincerely believe that the year ahead can be a  good year if we are more reflective, more attuned to the connections in the universe, and more loving toward others.

And, if we seek out opportunities to fail.

Some of you might be thinking – are you crazy Rabbi? I have enough failure in my life, and you want me to look for more?

Yes. I do.

Our Torah is filled with great role models of failure.  Abraham failed to make peace between Sarah and Hagar.  Jacob failed to teach his sons to love each other, causing Joseph to be sold into slavery.  Moses failed 9 times to convince the Pharoah to let the Israelites go, and he failed to keep the Israelites from backsliding into idolatry and selfishness and despair during their 40 years in the wilderness.  King David failed morally when he took Bathsheba as his wife.  Most of the prophets failed to convince the kings and the common Israelites to be loyal to God and God’s laws. 

Our Torah does not hide the failures: it includes them as part of our history.

So this Rosh Hashanah, I am inviting you to embrace failure.  Or, as Mark Frauenfelder, the author of Made By Hand puts it: have The Courage to Screw Up.

In Mark’s book on the Do It Yourself movement in the United States, he opens with a chapter entitled just that: The Courage to Screw Up.   He explains that most people loathe failure so much, they avoid trying things that require pushing past their current abilities.

How true this is, and we know where much of it comes from. In our educational system, mistakes are negative – points are taken off for errors.  We are judged and graded by how close we come to perfection.  This continues in our relationships when we have friends or relatives who keep a list of our past errors and don’t let them go.  And it happens in our worklife – when mistakes are taken as black marks on our personnel files, instead of being treated as opportunities to learn and be better at our jobs. 

in response to this learned avoidance of failure, when we start to do something new, and it begins to go wrong, most people give up rather than keep at it.

We’ve all seen children who get frustrated when they first start to learn a sport. They say things like “I’ll never be able to do it. “  “It’s too hard.” and sometimes: “I give up.”  Adults have these feelings too, but we are more likely to hide them or to figure out how to avoid something that seems too difficult.  For example, I don’t like going to group exercise classes. I know I will make mistakes in front of other people. And that will make me feel foolish and incompetent. So, I either take a class where everyone is a beginner and the teacher invites mistakes, or I exercise alone.  The truth is that no one cares about my mistakes in the gym – and the only way the others manage to move so smoothly through the routines is that they made mistakes and learned from them.  There is no shortcut.

Mistakes are not only inevitable, but a necessary part of learning and skill building. Brain research shows that making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn. When we do something wrong – we pay attention to it, we think it over, we analyze it: and out of that we learn. 

Tom Jennings, the brilliant inventor in the realm of the internet and computers, wrote in Make Magazine: “Mistakes are synonymous with learning.  it is true that Deep experience helps avoid problems, but mainly it gives  you mental  tools with which  to solve inevitable problems when they come up.”

Rosh Hashanah is a time to take out our mental toolbox, rummage around, and see what new items have shown up; What mistakes have morphed into life lessons, and which ones do we still need examine.

If we leave the toolbox locked up on the shelf, we miss an opportunity.  As Mark met with a variety of do it yourselfers – the kind that build cigar box guitars, or welded hand-made devices onto their espresso machines,  or designed their own chicken coops, or grew their own food – he discovered that, as he puts it: “The Best folks honor their mistakes – not hide them.” They even take pride in showing off their mistakes and what they learned from them.

The best folks honor their mistakes.  Not hide them, honor them.

This is a great message, a message we truly need to hear, right here at Temple Beth El this year.  It’s been a year challenging, painful, frustrating, and difficult times for our temple community.   Temple life was anything but perfect in the first months of the past Jewish year. We failed to be the kind of congregation we want to be. And then we had a choice: to learn from our conflicts or to shove them aside and just hope all would return to some new normal.

Rabbi Larry Kushner teaches that people will easily tell you what you’ve done right. It’s harder to get them to tell you about your Chaseyr – what you lack.  The best friends are not those who sweep your faults under the rug, but who hold up a mirror and sit by your side as you see the truth of who you are. They are not interested in merely making you feel better, they want you to be better.

I am proud of this Temple – of the members, the lay leaders, and the staff – for their willingness to join me in recent months in looking together at our individual and communal weaknesses, our frailties, even our failures. Instead of focusing on who is right and who is wrong, we came to ask: what can we learn? How can this experience give us the mental tools to face whatever challenges come next? How can we be a better temple – a better rabbi – a better board?  Now, looking forward to 5771, we have faith that it will be a year of moving forward, for we have new tools in our temple toolbox.

The best folks honor their mistakes.  In our personal lives, we need this lesson as well.  I would like to suggest that we do three things this coming week so that we transform our mistakes of the past year into blessings.

First.  Make a list of your mistakes.  Focus on a few that bring up the most disappointment in yourself.  Ask yourself: what have I learned from that? What would I not know about myself if I had not made that mistake? How have I begun to use my new knowledge of myself in my relationship with others or with the world? How am I better today, or how will I be better in the coming year, because of that mistake?

Second. We can sit down with someone who is close to us and who we trust, and ask them to help us reflect on our failures.  It needs to be someone who we truly believe wants us to be our best.  And we can be that trusted reflective partner to others.  Such friends or loved ones or counselors can help us find our blind spots. They can also encourage us, cheer us on as we make difficult changes, and not let us give up on ourselves.

Third, we can go out and take risks and make some more mistakes. 

We will all fail.  If we fail and do not reflect and learn, then the failure was wasted on us.  That is why the best gift we can give ourselves in life is the gift of failure.

We are entering aseret y’mei teshuvah – the ten days of repentance.  This holy period in the Jewish year would not exist if it were not for human failure.  There would be no teshuvah, no returning to our best selves, if we were already there – in a state of perfection.  Today is not about praying to be perfect.  It is about honoring our imperfections so that we can wrestle with them, understand them, and transform them.

Many years ago, I wrote a sermon about my son’s baseball card collection.  I contrasted the way cards are valued by dealers - the card with no dents or creases has the highest value - with the way we are valued by God.  When God looks us over, our dents and creases and worn places make us more – not less – valuable. We only grow from our flaws, not our perfections. 

Of course, there are different consequences to different failures.  If I try fail to take care of a house plant and it dies, there is no morality involved. If I fail another human being,  Judaism is clear that we must make address the relationship with apology and even reparation.  We will talk more about that at Kol Nidre. I am not suggesting this morning that we should purposely fail, but that we should accept that failure will be our lot. 

This summer several of us studied the Untaneh Tokef prayer together from the new book – Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die edited by Dr. Lawrence Hoffman.  Most of the contributors to the essays in that volume rejected the idea of a God that counts up our sins and decides our fate. Rather, they emphasized the human reality reflected in the prayer:  that we are mortal, that our individual lives are full of unpredictability and lack of personal control, and that we can be better human beings through repentance (reconciliation with others), through prayer (connecting to the highest values and ideals that Torah and God ask of us), and through Tzedaka, nourishing our lovingkindness.  There would be no needs for teshuva, tefila and tzedaka if there were no human failings.   The question is – will we add the tools of Judaism to our toolbox of how to improve after our failings, or will we give in and give up on ever changing.  The two worst responses to failure would be either to despair of the human condition, or to become complacent about it. Judaism asks us not merely to have faith in God, but to have faith in God’s creation: us.

I heard Dr. Rachel Remen explain it this way in a talk this past year: Failures teach there is life beyond failure: the seed of a new and different life.

Especially On Rosh Hashanah, we plant the seed of a new and different life.  the Chassidic teacher, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, taught that there is always another step, another rung to climb on the ladder of becoming.  We would all like to be a Tzaddik – a completely righteous person, without faults. But is that possible?

Judaism’s goal is not inner peace; it is about climbing that ladder. Rosh Hashanah is the pause to look down from the heights, to steady ourselves, to catch our breath, and to gather the courage to climb even higher.

The story is told of a student who asked his rebbe, “How will I know when I’ve reached the level of a  tzaddik?” The rebbe answered, “As long as you keep asking that question, you are there. When you stop asking, thinking you reached it, then you have not.”

Let me leave you with a closing thought from the poet,  Antonio Machado, which seems tailor-made for Rosh Hashanah, the day of apples and honey. He wrote:

Last night as I was sleeping

I dreamt—marvelous error!—

that I had a beehive

here inside my heart.

And the golden bees

were making white combs

and sweet honey

from my old failures. 

Dear God, accept our accomplishments and our failures from the year that has ended. In the months to come, send us your gifts of health, happiness, love, support, self-awareness and courage.   None of us will be spared challenges in the year ahead.   Help us do our best to engage in them and learn from them.  Grant us the courage to embrace the gift of failure, so that we may continue to grow into the human beings you meant us to be. 

Amen.

HOLY GROUND

HOLY GROUND         

Here’s my sermon given at Temple Beth El of Northern Valley (Closter, NJ) on Rosh Hashanah Morning, 5771/2010

OK.

So you get a job taking care of someone’s sheep.

Every week you take them out in the hills; let them eat; chase away wild predators.

Week after week.  Sometimes you come home at night to sleep. Sometimes you stay out in the hills. 

You eventually marry the boss’ daughter.  Life is quiet and predictable.  Which is a big improvement, because there’s actually a warrant out for your arrest back in your hometown. 

One day you’re just minding your own business and the sheep, when something catches the corner of your eye.  Maybe it’s just a reflection, but it’s just too weird. You turn to take a closer look.  Now it’s got some color – orange, yellow, red.  Doesn’t look quite right out here in the hills.  You move a little closer and something strange is happening to the bush in front of you.  It’s burning, but it’s not burning up.

And then comes the voice.  It tells you to take off your shoes because you are on holy ground.

Holy ground?  You’ve been walking these paths for years and the ground looks just like it always did.  Same dust. Same small rocks.  Same ants.  But you listen and you take off your beat-up sandals ‘cause you realize something has changed.  You can’t see it, but you can feel it.  When your bare feet touch the ground the voice continues. It tells you to go back to your hometown, confront a cruel leader, and make him give up his oppression of the Israelites, your people. 

This Rosh Hashanah morning, I would like us to think through the notion of Holy Ground together.   I would like to propose that in the midst of the discussion about what should or should not be built within a few blocks of Ground Zero, Judaism has something to say to us about what constitutes a holy place, about our own capacity for holiness, and about the way to promote holiness and tikkun olam as we enter a new year.

Can holiness reside in a place or an object?  When Moses stood next to the burning bush, the physical earth was like any other earth.  Holiness resided in the encounter with God.  When God breaks through from the realm of the supernatural into the realm of the natural, our physical world is momentarily transformed.  But did that spot in the desert remain holy once God had departed and Moses headed off to Egypt? As far as we know, Moses did not place a marker of some kind on the spot – expecting that if he came that way again, he would be able to find God there. What he learned was that God could speak to him anywhere – even in a lowly thornbush - if he was ready to listen.

We Jews have very few places we label as holy.  Tradition says there are four holy cities in Israel: Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron.  One was the site of the Temple – a place of prayer;  the great mystical rabbis taught in another, famous scholars are buried in the third, and the last is the burial place of the patriarchs.  Unlike certain religions that require pilgrimages to holy places, Judaism respects these holy places but there is no commandment to live in them or even to visit them.

And yet – we human beings know that an intense experience in a place can leave an imprint in the mind, influencing thoughts and emotions. Visiting that place can bring back the event in a way that photos or memories cannot.  There are couples who return on their anniversary to the place where the marriage proposal took place and feel their romance bloom again.  Or adults who like to go back and visit their childhood home and are filled with nostalgia.  Some Holocaust survivors return to stand in the places of suffering and loss  - taking their children with them to pass on the sense of place.

Our human imagination and empathy allow us to feel the holiness that someone else experienced in a place, even long after the event. That is part of the mystery of visiting places where great events happened. Just two years ago, standing on the small hill of rubble at the site where the last fighters of the Warsaw ghetto made their stand at #18 Mila Street in Warsaw, I could feel the echoes of courage and sacrifice. Here in the United States, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. return me to the passion of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” – though I was not there in person that day in 1963.  And anyone standing on the deck of the floating white memorial to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii cannot help but sense the extraordinary events of that tragic day. 

  

When we stand physically in a place that was the site of a blessing or a tragedy or a life-changing event: Our rational side says – it’s just earth like any other.   It is our imagination and our empathy that make it glow again with the energy of that event.

But the holiness is not in the place.  It is in the deeds that occurred there.  And it is  within ourselves - as we choose how to respond to those awe-filled memories.  Holy Ground is not about the ground itself, but about what that memory evokes.

And so we ask the second question: Is there a way to be holy without standing at a Burning Bush?  Do all of us have access to the sacred?  The answer is yes.  There is another dimension to holiness.  Human actions, relationships, and experiences can also be holy.  Like Moses, you have probably had sacred moments in your life – whether you used the word holy “kadosh” or not.

Maybe it was the moment a baby was born in your family; or when you handed the Torah to your child as he became a Bar Mitzvah; or when you were blessed at the Ark on your Bat Mitzvah day.  Perhaps it was under the chuppah on your wedding day  - a Jewish marriage ceremony is actually called kiddushin – because each partner says to the other: you are now kadosh to me – no longer ordinary, but unique.

Or perhaps you experienced the holy when you walked away from a potentially fatal car accident; or you were so moved by nature, or music or art that you felt transported outside of yourself.

Think of it this way – in our ordinary lives we move along the surface of experience. We go to work, school; we have conversations with friends and family; we play some ball, eat some pizza, watch a movie, take out the trash.  Sit in the sanctuary. And then something shifts.  The experience turns deeper in some way – and we feel connected to the world, to our feelings, to our values, or to others more intensely.

Those deep inner connections are a glimpse into the realm of the holy:  God’s realm. Holiness is when the curtain separating us from God is pulled back for a moment, and a reality beyond our normal vision is momentarily revealed.

In the Torah, we are called to be a holy people.  This is not how we dress or eat, but how we act toward others.  When a deed of lovingkindess or caring or honesty or justice enters this world, it also adds to the reservoir of the sacred. We do not need to travel to some physical location to access this kind of holiness – it is a potential inside of us at all times.  Holy ground is not where we are, it is when we are – when we are being our best selves.

Holy ground is a tennis court off to the side of the main courts in Dubai back in February when Venus Williams played a match against Shahar Peer of Israel.  Shahar was there because Venus had refused to attend the tournament if Dubai banned the Israeli, as it had done the year before.  Venus’ stand for justice made that court holy ground.

Holy Ground is a bench in the outdoor sanctuary at Eisner Camp this summer when a homesick ten year old was comforted by a friend who put her arm around her and told her it would be O.K.

Holy ground is the living room of a home in Northern Valley when a husband admitted to his wife that he was a drug addict and agreed to go into rehab.

Holy ground is sitting by the bed of an ill parent in the hospital, dabbing at his lips with a little water-filled sponge while you wait for him to come back to full consciousness.

Holy ground is a golf course when14 year old Zach Nash disqualified himself and surrendered his medal after winning a junior Wisconsin PGA tournament. He discovered he had one too many golf clubs in his bag a couple hours after the tournament. His comment: "I knew right away I couldn't live with myself if I kept this medal.”

Holy ground is when an Israeli stands in front of a bulldozer sent to demolish a Bedouin’s home because the government won’t extend a building permit. And holy ground is when a young Israeli soldier stands at a checkpoint keeping his country safe.

Holy ground is the stone pavement near the Wailing Wall when Women of the Wall read from the Torah and assert their religious rights.

Holy ground is a temple educator’s office when the phone rings with teachers calling in to offer to give up their jobs if the staff is downsized so that the needier teachers among them can keep their positions.

Holy ground is a makeshift hospital in Haiti or Africa or a clinic in the Bronx or Newark or Paterson, when a doctor is giving free medical care to those in need.

Holy ground is a nursing home when a twelve year old becomes a friendly visitor to a lonely resident; or a field when he plays ball with a child with special needs.

Each of us stands on holy ground when our words and actions bring the holy into this world. 

And so my final question – How can we promote holiness and further the work of Tikun Olam: perfecting this world that God placed in our care? 

The holiness of Ground Zero was conferred by the tears shed, the sympathy expressed, the unity experienced by the rest of the nation – most of whom never stood at Ground Zero. Its holiness lives inside survivors who faced death and rebuilt lives that were forever changed. Its holiness is in the courage of rescuers and responders and ordinary folk helping their co-workers or even strangers.

The ground at Ground Zero cries out to us to reject the senseless hatred and radical religious fanaticism that caused the tragedy in the first place.  And we do that best by removing hatred and fanaticism from our own lives.  Ground Zero calls for neighbors to reach out a helping hand to neighbors, as they did on 9-11, without regard for race, religion, age or gender.  The barriers between us melted away for a brief moment on that day – the enemy did what he never imagined: he made all Americans one.  And we must not lose that one-ness, that unity, that great American ideal in which our differences and our diversity become our greatest strength.

The only way to spread religious understanding and brotherhood and religious freedom is to live it here at home.  The fanatics like Al Qaeda hate us because they are afraid of the freedoms we enjoy.  We must therefore protect those freedoms with more zeal than ever.  We are naïve if we think the current controversy is limited to keeping one mosque away from the neighborhood of Ground Zero. It is part of a greater reaction against the presence of American Muslims in our cities and towns. The story of Ground Zero ought to be about what our country stands for – the values that radical fundamentalists rejected: democracy, and tolerance, and diversity.

And that is why we need an Islamic cultural center just a few blocks from Ground Zero.  Because The Muslim community behind 451 Park Place is exactly the kind of Muslim community that is needed in America.  The center will be a kind of Muslim JCC – a gathering place for individuals and families that see no conflict between their religion and their identity as Americans.  Its founders are not newcomers to the neighborhood.  They live out the values of respect, human dignity, interfaith cooperation, lovingkindness in all that they do. And for that, they are as hated by Al Qaeda as we are. 

The great Rabbi Hillel taught – in a place where there is no humanity, act with humanity. We must judge each person, each religious community, by its own values and behaviors.  We Jews know what it was like to be looked down on by others, to have our religion denigrated and despised and called evil.  To have our presence in America blocked, our synagogues opposed.  We therefore have an obligation to see that no one else is treated this way.

Today, on this Rosh Hashanah morning, we read in the Untaneh Tokef prayer how God musters and numbers and counts each of us.  I want to be counted – and I want all of our Jewish people to be counted – among those who stand up and say:  I am offended and outraged when untruths are spoken about any religion, culture, or ethnic group. 

Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust writer and scholar, once wrote:  “A Jew must be sensitive to the pain of all human beings. A Jew cannot remain indifferent to human suffering, whether in other countries or in our own cities and towns. The mission of the Jewish people has never been to make the world more Jewish, but to make it more human.”

Today is the birthday of the world.  The first human beings that God created were not Jews, or Christians, or Buddhists, or Muslims or anything else. According to the midrash, God took a little clay of every color, from every part of the earth, and from that formed the first man.  And God made only one man and woman from whom all others are descended, so that from the beginning no one would be able to say to another – my blood is redder than yours.

So, how shall we celebrate this Rosh Hashanah? How can we make it a truly holy day and the year ahead a holy year?

One way is to recognize that wherever we stand is holy ground when we stand up for what is right.  When we hear someone accusing all Moslems of being violent or hateful, we must speak up, as Jews.  We must be on the side of tolerance and respect. We can also make our position known in person. This Sunday there will be a Religious Freedom interfaith gathering at St. Peter’s Church, a block from Ground Zero from 3-4 pm, followed by a walk to 451 Park Place. 

Another way to make this year sacred is to meet our Muslim neighbors.  In the 50’s and 60’s we Jews reached out to the Christians among whom we lived.  We created interfaith Thanksgivings, and dialogue groups, and had our Christian neighbors over for Chanukah or Passover. We believed, correctly for the most part, that if they knew us personally they would give up their negative stereotypes.  The tables are turned: it’s we who – if we are honest – harbor negative stereotypes of Muslims. Two weeks ago in the middle of Ramadan, Peter and I attended a break-fast at the home of a Turkish family in Cliffside Park.  There was no agenda except to break down the barriers between those of different religions by sharing a meal. We will be returning the favor by inviting them to our Sukkah at the end of this month. It’s time for us all to reach out to the Muslims in our own neighborhoods. I invite those of you who would like to create some event here at the temple to bring Jews and Muslims together to be in touch after the holidays.

Moses put his sandals back on his feet and set out for the Pharoah’s palace.  In the years ahead, he would hear God’s voice in many places – in Egypt, at the Sea of Reeds, on Mount Sinai, and one last time as he stood looking over the Jordan River at the promised land.  But I imagine he never forgot that first encounter, when a voice called out from a burning bush.  My wish for each of you, and for myself, is that we we heed that burning call from God in the New Year – and respond with deeds of lovingkindness, justice, and compassion.  Then, wherever we walk, it will be holy ground.

Amen.