Kol HaLev - High Holy Days

To attend the High Holy Days services, complete the attached registration form and return it to Kol HaLev by email or mail
no later than Wednesday, September 21st.
High Holy Days Registration Form

High Holiday Reflection
Rabbi Alexis Pearce

August 2011
High Holiday Message, 5772

Here we are at the end and the beginning; the point in the year when the ends of the circle come together, and we roll back to the beginning to start over. We come to Rosh HaShanah 5772 on Wednesday evening, September 28, 2011. Yom Kippur arrives Friday night October 7. The sukkah goes up a few days later, and Sukkot begins Wednesday evening October 12, a week later we roll the Torah back to the beginning, and the weekend of October 21-21 brings us to Shabbat Breisheet, where the Torah portion tells us how it all began.

Thirteen years ago, my youngest child made her appearance in the world on the 4th of Tishri, 5759, just a few days after Rosh HaShanah. She first attended synagogue for Neilah of Yom Kippur that year. So we will celebrate her Bat Mitzvah on Shabbat Breisheet, nine weeks away as of this writing, but who’s counting? Consequently, I have been listening to her practice the maftir for Shabbat Breisheet, over and over, until at times I can't get it out of my head. This is not the famous part; not the seven days of Creation, which will be our Rosh HaShanah portion this year. It’s not Adam and Eve in the Garden, or Cain and Abel, or the extraordinarily long lived people like Methuselah, or the strange story fragment about the “divine beings” falling in love with “the daughters of men.” It’s a section very rarely thought of. It’s where God regrets starting the whole thing:

“And God saw that the badness of man was big on the land, and every impulse of his thought was only bad all day. And He had to console himself that He made man on the land, and was sad. And God said I will blot out the man (adam) I created from the face of the earth (adamah), from man to beast to creepers to birds, because I’m sorry I made them.” (Gen 6:5-7, personal translation). Hearing these words from my precious beautiful little baby girl day after day has been quite odd. On the one hand, she is the future and all our hopes and dreams are pinned on kids like her, finding their way, new to everything. On the other hand, what’s true is true. You don’t have to go far for plenty of reason to agree heartily with the sentiments expressed here by God. The list of our sins in the mahzor, the awful experiences we or our loved ones have endured, the daily newspaper, our struggles with ourselves, even at times the behavior of pretty teenagers – all of it shows this badness, deeper and creepier than you want to admit. Scandals, betrayals, cruelties; why does any of it surprise us? We’ve been bad to the bone since the very beginning. We stand up and admit it in public, year after year. And we’ll be back next year, with another big load of confessions, just as horrible. On the other hand, we do keep starting over and trying again. For this, we have a wonderful model in God too. While God does admit Creation was a big disappointment, the character of God as drawn in Genesis does not give up so fast. The next and last line of the portion is, “But Noah found favor in God’s eyes.” (Gen 6:8). God saves one family and starts over.It doesn’t go that well. Ten generations later, God gives up on all that and starts over again, this time with Abraham. And we know that doesn’t go so well either. During the late summer while the Torah portrays Moses preparing the people for their victorious Return to the land, we also commemorate Tisha B’Av, remembering the defeat and Expulsion that followed. You start to wonder what sustained God’s hope that people would ever do honor to the image they were made in.

It’s been a very sad year for a number of our members; we have lost cherished elders and precious children. When we hear the stark words of the Unetaneh Tokef, we may wonder what it would have been like to know at this point last year what the new year would bring; who would live and who would die? They are frightful words because they force us to admit that we might, that we will suffer losses. We may be more inclined to dwell on the hardships and sorrows, the defeats and failures, than to feel a rush of thrill in a new beginning. At some point, we’re too exhausted to begin again.

Sometimes the tradition can carry us when we lose our way and don’t know how to keep going. The roller coaster of the High Holidays forces us through reunion and ceremony, confession, repentance, atonement, grief. Yet when the shofar finally sounds and the ordeal is over, we feel light, washed clean, forgiven, and yes, hopeful. We made it through all of this after-all; maybe we can make tomorrow a little better. Maybe wounds can heal. Maybe justice can prevail here and there. Maybe it’s worth keeping at it. We can look at our lives a little like God in Breisheet, noticing that there is something here worth saving. What can be the seed of new beginning? And we can be sure, we’ll be asking the same question next year.

High Holiday Reflection
Rabbi Alexis Pearce

August 2010
High Holiday Message, 5771

The daunting task of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is to seek forgiveness and atonement. But to be forgiven, we must learn to forgive. We must be willing not to excuse or forget but to renounce anger and resentment about wrongs done to us. We must be willing to see ourselves in a harsh and clear light that says I’m not perfect either, and I’m not so different from the one who hurt me.

The High Holy Days foster peace and wholeness by focusing on one of the worst enemies of wholeness: the dishonesty that we maintain that we are guiltless and deserving, and in control of our lives. Such ideas, while they seem cozy, will ultimately eat away at our integrity until there is no peace for us. But now as we face ourselves, as we enter into the process of teshuvah, of true repentance, once we have discovered our shortcomings, we stand a chance of finding a real source of lasting peace and wholeness.

The High Holidays bring us back to life. They invite us to an awareness that makes us cherish our days as if they were numbered, which in fact, they are. Our secular culture pressures us to avoid pain and to fear loss, but this avoidance robs us of profound experiences of gratitude, strength, and awareness. Everything, everyone passes away. How can we say we are really alive if we are not living in response to that truth? Every single moment is precious and vanishing. Paradoxically, avoiding this leads to a half life of waste and regret where we fear to live because we fear to die. Facing our grief and fear about it can lead to joy and triumph.

The High Holidays call us to awareness, call us to be more authentically who we really are. It’s an arduous spiritual exercise, but it leaves us vibrantly alive, receptive, humble. In the words of Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg, in this season, “may we touch the inner place where hatred and revenge dissolve. May we be blessed with a new vision and a new heart. May we be blessed to touch the shalom that dwells within our innermost beings.” To a sweet and joyful new year!

HH Message from Alexis Pearce

    Consider the Shofar. If we know what it is and how to use it, it is an effective tool to arouse our dozing souls to renewed spiritual alertness. As we blow through it, our very lifebreath is transformed into a sound that has rallied our people since ancient times. The ram’s horn evokes the memory of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah, the test of faith, the terror of surrender, the ultimate assurance of God’s loving protection. It tells us that the precious things in our life are only ours when we are willing to put God above everything. It is the siren that blares in our souls when we are about to make a grave mistake. Rosh HaShanah is a formal moment for hearing it, and responding to the call to reorder our lives in accordance with our highest values, to turn back from the wrong paths we may have started down, before it’s too late.

    If we don’t know what it is, the shofar is a mute and curious relic of the past.

    What is it that we have inherited in our Judaism? It used to seem to me to be like a locked treasure chest. I had some clues that there were priceless jewels in it, but I couldn’t break in. Our parents and grandparents carried this treasure here from other places. They survived the trauma of immigration and learning to be Americans and figured out how to help their children succeed in a different and better culture, a society of more freedom, equality, and prosperity than we had ever experienced before. They built us a lot of institutions and organizations. We inherited a Jewish world that was institutionally strong but content weak. The treasure chest was locked. The turbulence of immigration and then Holocaust, in the context of the rising tide of science and technology, left many feeling the spiritual content of Judaism was antiquated, dry, unresponsive to contemporary needs; a relic.

    Reconstructionist Judaism looks frankly at these circumstances and stubbornly insists that the content is there and can be unlocked; that Judaism can still address us intimately and bracingly, in contemporary terms and in light of all that we now know. We have to be willing to admit that some of it has broken down, that it’s life is in its constant and gradual transformation. We have to take responsibility for ourselves and not leave it to some authority to tell us what to do. We don’t have to accept anything without rationality. We don’t have to go back to supernatural beliefs. But we do have to allow an exploration of our relationship with the divine to be part of our religious life, and have the courage to be open minded.

    Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the architect of Reconstructionist Judaism, understood Judaism to be an evolving religious civilization, not just a culture. God is at the center. Again, you don’t have to believe anything you can’t accept; go ahead and be an agnostic. You won’t hurt my feelings. Perhaps that is the only really honest stance for any of us, to be agnostic and not completely sure we know. I agree it is impossible to define God; we can’t even define ourselves.

    On Rosh HaShanah, we spend a lot of time wrestling with ourselves, regretting the ways in which our own will is run by selfishness, fear, and other negatives. But we can grow toward a richer and more meaningful sense of harmony with God’s will, a more nurturing sense of being in loving and trustworthy hands, without ever giving over our rational capabilities or independence or power. The shofar sounds a note of hope; a still small voice in this amplified digitized world, a tuning fork to bring us back into spiritual harmony.

    If our Judaism is to continue to be a treasure worth preserving and passing on, it has to offer us ways to relate to spiritual reality that really mean something to us, and accord with what we perceive to be true. It has to support our struggle to act for good in the world. Reconstructionism gives us a way to accept this challenge.

Kol HaLev, is Houston's one and only Reconstructionist congregation, a long-standing resource in our Jewish community. Reconstructionist congregations are egalitarian and inclusive, focusing on respecting tradition as well as bringing Judaism into the present, and fostering a strong community. Affiliated with the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, Kol HaLev is led mostly by lay leadership but also invites Reconstructionist Rabbis and Rabbinical students to lead the congregation during multiple shabbatons. At this time, we are excited to welcome Rabbi Alexis Pearce to the Houston Jewish community for High Holy Days and several shabbatons to be scheduled throughout the year. The first one is July 31-August 1, 2009.

Rabbi Alexis Pearce (nee Roberts) currently resides in San Diego, CA, but travels widely to lead congregations in their study of Reconstructionist Jewish practice. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1983, and her Master's degree in Hebrew Letters and Ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1993. Rabbi Pearce is currently pursuing a degree in Clinical Pastoral Education, doing a residency at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, CA.

Her professional career began in roles relating to Judaism and education at various Reconstructionist and Reform synagogues on the East Coast, ranging from Beit Tikvah in Baltimore to Mishkan Shalom in Philadelphia. She then moved to the West Coast, after finishing her own education, to continue as Education Director for Temple Ami Shalom in West Covina.

She served as rabbi for Congregation Dor Hadash in San Diego from 1996 to 2005. Rabbi Pearce has spent her life studying and supporting the Reconstructionist movement, and is an active advocate for bringing peace to all people. We are honored to have her impart her wisdom to us and lead us through a new chapter in the history of our congregation. She will lead us for High Holy Days and several Shabbatons throughout the next year.