Sermonfest

What's God have to do with it?

Lisa Tuttle — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:43:52 -0400

Rabbi Sid SchwarzHere is an excerpt from Rabbi Sid Schwarz's Yom Kippur sermon delivered at Adat Shalom this year. Download the entire sermon.

Some of you will remember the old Art Linkletter show. His signature piece on the show was his interviews with children which he later compiled in a book called, Kids Say the Darndest Things. I thought of this when I recently picked up a book entitled, Children’s Letters to God. Here are a few excerpts:

Dear God:

Thank you for the baby brother but what I prayed for was a puppy. Joyce

Maybe Cain and Abel wouldn’t kill each other so much if they had their own rooms. It works with my brother. Larry

Who draws the lines around countries? Nan

Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones why don’t you just keep the ones you got now? Anita

My brother told me about being born, but it doesn’t sound right. Marsha

I didn’t think that purple went with orange until I saw the sunset you made on Tuesday. That was cool. Eugene

Be honest. How many of you would like to ask at least one of these questions?

Rabbi Schwarz was the founding rabbi of Adat Shalom and currently serves as the founder/president of PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values.

A Call to Practice Hospitality

Rabbi Elyse Wechterman — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:08:02 -0400

Here is an excerpt of a sermon I wrote for this Rosh Hashanah. Download the whole sermon.

Hospitality, true hospitality takes those who are vulnerable and raises them up, supporting them in such a way that they are more likely to meet the unexpected with strength and dignity to fight on. They see themselves as having worth and value and that they have something to offer to the world.

And who of us does not think of ourselves as vulnerable at different points in our daily lives – starting new schools, new jobs, being put into new situations where we feel isolated and may begin to question the value of our perspective, our knowledge, our self-worth? Don’t think that it is just the visibly weak or feeble who are vulnerable. It is all of us. And we need to recognize it in ourselves and in others and begin to welcome each other into our lives in a way that builds self-worth and doesn’t perpetuate our isolation.

God Laughs - A Sermon by Rabbi Stephen Booth-Nadav

Rabbi Shai Gluskin — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:39:10 -0400

Here is an excerpt from Rabbi Steve Booth's Rosh Hashanah sermon from this year. Download the complete sermon.

A couple summers ago, I was sailing a large rented sailboat on Lake Dillon with Rabbi Soloway from Boulder. I was thrilled to discover he was as experienced and skilled a sailor as I, as he grew up ocean racing in England. It was just the two of us, a somewhat blustery late spring day, but we were doing fine. As the wind slowly built up however, I was steering, and I said: “Marc, I know its a pain, but if we reefed the main down a bit, it would be easier to steer and we’d have more control.” He agreed, and we did it.

As he finished with the sail and looked back to me from the deck, as we both started to nod that yes, this was better, ....BOOM! -- ....we heard something pop.... and with a sick feeling, looked up, and watched in slow motion as the mast broke, and the sails and all the rigging simply blew off the boat! We were dead in the water, dragging our sails and rigging. (Sound at all like anyone’s life this year?)

Good thing we were two rabbis... better yet... good thing we were two experienced sailors. Marc quickly started to haul in the sails and rigging, while I tried to start the outboard motor. Interestingly, neither of us was getting anywhere. So silently, as a team, we switched positions. As I was hauling in the rigging, I noticed that the wind was slowly blowing us towards a rocky shore. Not good. I thought, “you know... this stuff makes a good anchor,” and I dropped everything back in the water.

The short version of the story is that Marc got the engine started and I hauled in the cold, wet rigging. We kept our heads, worked as a team, and to the shock of the folks at the Dillion Marina, on our own we brought the boat, sails, and all the rigging back safely to dock. We did this by not fighting the changes, but by adjusting to them. We worked together and stayed on course.

Rabbi Stephen Booth-Nadav leads B'nai Havurah in Denver, Colorado.

Little Miss Sunshine, a Reflection for Rosh Hashana

Rabbi Rick Brody — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:31:58 -0400

Rabbi Rick BrodyRemember the media craze surrounding Lauren Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina in last month’s Miss Teen USA pageant, the young woman who stumbled into notoriety through a blunder on national television. That episode offered many lessons to reflect on, the first being the idea that we all stand under the bright lights of judgment, dumbstruck and speechless, without a clue how to account for ourselves.

There’s more for us to learn from Caitlin’s gaffe. How did we get to the point where such absurdity draws so much of our attention? Why do we shine the spotlight on rather unremarkable people and then reap some kind of sadistic pleasure when they prove themselves to be seemingly unworthy of our focus?

On the flip side of the same coin, why do we invest so much trust and hope in the supposed heroes of popular culture and then lament the lack of role models when these icons fall from grace?

I want to look at the whole charade of the beauty contest, and the way in which our infatuation with competition in general – the endless, ladder-climbing pursuit of some kind of external validation of our worth, the insatiable desire to be crowned king or queen – ultimately leaves us empty. We’re always trying to “get ahead,” and many of us will stop at nothing to advance our journey to the top.

Can we climb that ladder with integrity or humility, or do the constant moral failures of our most famous competitors suggest to us that something about our priorities and our focus is inherently flawed? What does our obsession with winning do to us, and what does it really mean to be a winner, anyway? What is a hero? A role model?

Last year’s double-Oscar-winning independent film, Little Miss Sunshine, which is itself about a beauty pageant, begins with Richard Hoover, the father and wannabe self-help guru, played by Greg Kinnear, offering the following philosophy of life: “There are two kinds of people in this world – winners and losers.” One film critic notes that at that very moment, Richard’s admitting to himself that he’s a loser. The whole film is really about being a loser and happily owning that status, rather than trying to be something you’re not.

Last night I talked about our need to honestly face the reality that we are lost – that we’re lacking direction and that although we have maps – spiritual aids – in helping us find our way, we don’t have any definite answers. Today, I want to look beyond the way we are lost on our own journeys, and at the way there’s a little bit of loser in all of us. That’s not all we are – in the end, we’re not winners or losers, but simply people.

Yet the loser within us usually shines through when we become so fixated on winning. By striving so narrowly for some kind of external definition of success, all we do is set ourselves up for failure. And we amplify this betrayal of ourselves when we pass onto our children the misguided notion that success is obtainable through superficial awards and crowns – and when we place our hopes in them to obtain for us the illusion of glory that we never garnered. We strip them of any real sense of worth when we lead them to think that winning is what matters most, that the ends of victory justify any means of getting there.

I want to suggest that these Days of Awe are the anti-beauty contest. In a beauty pageant, individuals stand before rather ordinary people who have somehow been granted the role of judges. The contestants implicitly submit to these judges’ authority by saying, “You, oh judges, are so important, so powerful, that your act of placing a crown upon my head will have real significance for me.” On Rosh HaShanah, we stand before the unfathomable and extraordinary Source of Creation and of Compassion and of Justice, and we say, “Oh Judge, You are so important, so powerful, that our act of crowning You will have real significance.” Let’s take the crown off our own heads. Let’s prostrate ourselves before the Eternal Holy Blessed One whose miracles are beyond measure, without Whose power none of us could stand here at all, even for a second.

Being a human hero in the eyes of Torah and our tradition means recognizing that the world does not revolve around us, and that the noblest thing we can do is forego the outward praise of ourselves and instead bestow it upon the One to whom our praise is due. This mentality makes Judaism profoundly countercultural. When all around us we see people reaching for the crown to place it on their own heads, we’re reaching to remove it from ourselves and place it on God.

Now, shunning the winner’s spotlight doesn’t mean that we are losers. That’s precisely the error of black-and-white thinking that Greg Kinear’s character presents us – the idea that if you aren’t taking the crown, then you are somehow weak, a failure. Judaism – especially at this time of year – stresses that by humbly recognizing our shortcomings and weaknesses, we attain a more enduring strength and step not into the “winner’s circle,” but into the “human circle.” Life is not about winning and losing. It’s about living.

This is the final message of Little Miss Sunshine. One reviewer calls the film an “injunction against a society that requires every American to be a winner, when simply being a human being used to be enough.” In the end, we are not winners or losers; we are simply people. As long as we persist in these false distinctions of winners and losers, we guarantee that some people are left irrelevant and less than human. The problem with beauty contests isn’t that they expose ordinary, fallible people like Lauren Caitlin Upton for the human beings they are; if anything, that’s their saving grace – their real beauty! The problem is that they delude us into thinking that the contestants are something more than what they are. The less we push people to celebrate distinctions that are themselves irrelevant – how pretty someone is, how well someone can offer a thirty-second answer to a question that has nothing to do with her actual skills or strengths – the more we give them the chance to actually be themselves.

Richard Hoover’s father, Grandpa, played by Alan Arkin, offers a different take. He claims that “Losers are people who are so afraid of not winning, they don’t even try.” This wisdom bears repeating: “Losers are people who are so afraid of not winning, they don’t even try.”

Interestingly, a sense of the truth in Judaism’s anti-winner, countercultural message has spawned a fascination in the opposite direction – there’s a trend in our society to jump on the “loser” bandwagon: Many of those who lose on American Idol wind up gaining more attention than the winners. We also have a perverse attraction to the celebrity meltdown. The countless run-ins with law enforcement, the checking into drug rehab, the public apologies, the scandals of cheating, lying, and steroid use – they all seem to suggest that the supposed winners have now shown their true colors as losers – even though we remove all color and gray from the picture when we slip into such black and white thinking. We imagine these fallen stars are giving us permission to laugh at them, while secretly we are identifying with them for the fallible human beings they are.

Caitlin Upton’s blunder attracted thousands of people to deride her apparent lack of intelligence. This attention suggested that a) we could really discern someone’s true intelligence from a superficial pageant, especially from a moment in which she froze under pressure, and b) that it mattered that a pretty young woman somehow wasn’t also brilliant. Who cares? The people running the pageant clearly didn’t – here’s the question they posed to the eventual winner, Miss Colorado, Hilary Carol Cruz: “Who do you admire most and why – Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, or Nicole Ritchie?” Clearly, there’s no vested interest in hearing these young woman reflect on anything of substance.

No wonder Caitlin was caught off-guard by a question that required her to think. The problem isn’t that she’s incapable of thinking – we’ll probably never know because of the script that society has handed her for her role in which her physical beauty has typecast her. The problem is that we shepherd people into these stereotyped roles and tell them, on one hand, that certain traits they possess are the only ones that matter while on the other hand, we say, “you can be everything to all people. And, in fact, you must be, in order to matter.” Like in the Simon and Garfunkel song Mrs. Robinson, “any way you look at it, you lose.”

Why are we holding up young, vulnerable people – who’ve received disproportionate attention because of one trait, such as their looks – as false promises of perfection? Is it because we know they can’t fulfill that promise and we really want to see them fail? Many people responded to Caitlin’s gaffe by saying she “disgraced America.” Come on! The disgrace is the focus on pageantry and the crowing of beauty queens in the first place. The disgrace is the way we rushed to focus on this story, rather than the stories of real suffering, loss, and injustice that plague our society.

Somehow we’re more comfortable seeing failure we can laugh at than seeing success – and certainly more than any failure we might actually be able to take some responsibility for and help change. It’s easy to identify it in someone else. And it certainly draws more headlines than success stories or substantive discussion of real problems. As one blogger pointed out, “If Miss Illinois gave a splendidly mature and nuanced answer to a question about global warming,” no one’s passing that around the internet. Why do we choose this path? Because we like setting people up for failure? Because we can’t stand to see success when we’re not the ones in the spotlight? Because we can never trust that anyone is as great as he or she seems?

I would like to suggest that we steer ourselves back to the center – away from the extreme reaction of celebrating the loser and away from obsession with the winner; then we can arrive at a modest celebration of real people, recognizing talent and success when it truly emerges, but also recognizing that people are not just their successes or their failures. They are human beings with both strengths and weaknesses, always growing, always working to refine themselves towards being more human. Not more than human – simply more human; more real.

I think of two athletes – one who has tried to be more than human, the other who proved that he was more human. Baseball’s new career home-run king, Barry Bonds, seems to have stolen his crown by rebelling against his own humanity and fallibility. Humility does not appear to be part of his vocabulary. Contrast this model with Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt, who knew when it was time to bow gracefully out of the spotlight. It was the end of May in 1989 when Schmidt, at 39, was hitting a meager .203 with six homers. He was 7th on the all-time home run list, and I remember hoping he would continue to climb the ladder of statistical success. How shocked I was when I saw him crying at a press conference, announcing his sudden retirement: “Over the years,” he said, “I’ve set high standards for myself …, and I always said that when I couldn’t live up to those standards I would retire. … I no longer have the skills needed to make adjustments at the plate to hit or to make some plays in the field and run the bases. … I feel like I could ask the Phillies to keep me on to add to my statistics, but my love for the game won’t let me do that.” As a teenager, I didn’t quite understand this running from the supposed glory of increased statistical success. But I’ve never forgotten that speech, and I now see it as a noble display of humility and integrity.

A year later, Schmidt spoke at a special night in his honor, and offered the following wisdom: “All kids need heroes, … every young child. This is especially important now when children are more vulnerable than during any other period in history. I hope I have ‘touched’ kids in a positive way. To me everyone who wears a uniform carries the responsibility of becoming a positive role model. … This is more important than any home run, any play, or any statistic. All these fade with time. But being a positive role model both on and off the field helps others become better human beings.” The world needs more Mike Schmidts, people who see that life is not about winning or losing, but about living.

Our Biblical Mike Schmidt is the patriarch Jacob. He wrestles with a divine being throughout the night, injures his hip-socket, and then retires from the contest – not as a winner in the conventional sense, but as one who gave it his best shot and stayed in the fight till morning. He receives no jolt of super-human strength and he knows he can’t continue – it’s time to step back into the real world and live. So he exits the contest – without any crown or public honor – but with a new name that, the angel tells him, means he is one who struggles and has proven himself capable. The name is Yisrael, Israel. This is our name. We are ones who struggle and prove ourselves capable. Jacob isn’t awarded the title of winner – he simply becomes more human, limping away, much more Mike Schmidt than Barry Bonds.

Ultimately, of course, our goal is not to be Mike Schmidt or Jacob or any other role model. Our goal is simply to be ourselves. The Chasidic master Reb Zusya, crying on his deathbed, explained to his disciples his greatest fear. “I am afraid of what God will ask me when I die. I know God will not ask me, ‘Why were you not like Abraham?’ … or ‘Why were you not like Moses?’ But when God looks upon me and says, ‘Zusya, my child – why were you not Zusya?’ What shall I say then?”

I’d like to think that at that moment of judgment, Zusya could find upon his head a crown that celebrates the glory of his having been himself. And then he would reach for the crown, humbly remove it, place it upon the Almighty where it truly belongs, and limp away – not a winner or loser, but one who was fully human. May we all in this coming year come closer to achieving the potential of complete and imperfect humanity that is God’s greatest gift to us all.

Israel, Zionism (re) Considered

R Elizabeth Bolton — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:48:29 -0400

Mt. Arbel, Israel Light and Shadow: photo by Shai GluskinBelow is an excerpt from a sermon I gave Rosh Hashanah morning. Download a pdf to read the sermon in its entirety.

We are praying here today in the language and telling the stories of the ancestors we share with our Israeli sisters and brothers, with the sancta and canon passed down ledor vador/from generation to generation, beginning with our peoples’ experiences in that land.

Along with a rising generation of newly-engaged Israelis studying Torah and praying together, we are doing it not as strictly interpreted by halakha but engaged with and informed by it. We must be no less engaged with and informed by Zionism and the Jewish state.

Rabbi Lina Zerbarini on Change

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 15:57:02 -0400

Rabbi Lina ZerbariniBelow is an excerpt from Rabbi Lina Zerbarini's Rosh Hashanah sermon delivered at Yale this year. She is a 1997 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and the Associate Rabbi at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale University. Download the sermon in its entirety.

I do believe in possibility, in growth and change. And yet, the process of change is frightening, marked by fits and starts and two steps forward and one - or three - steps back - in myself and in others.

I am the parent of three special needs children. One had been in placement for nearly four years and returned home this summer. So school arrived with hope and anxiety for both of us. The first week - which was three days - was amazing - she got up, every day, easily. She joined the volleyball team - fabulous. And I struggled: do I accept this and rejoice or do I gird myself against the day she doesn’t get up?

How do I stay open to her change and yet protect myself (and her) from the sadness, or disappointment I will feel when she has a bad day (which she inevitably will - and, in fact, did, on Monday, the 4th day of school).

There’s a tension between openness and self-protection. And not only with others, perhaps even more so with ourselves. How do we strive and yet not be hurt or plunged into despair by our (inevitable) failures?

Unpacking Apology from Rabbi Bonnie Koppell

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:33:27 -0400

Rabbi Bonnie KoppellIn this Yom Kippur Sermon written for this year, Rabbi Bonnie Koppel draws on the work of Maimonidies' Hilchot Teshuva, the Laws of Repentance, and Gary Chapman and Jennifer Thomas' 2006 book, The Five Languages of Apology to unpack the process of apologizing in order to get us to do more of it.

Rabbi Bonnie Koppell is a 1981 Graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She has served the Jewish community of Phoenix for the last twenty years as a congregational rabbi, and, additionally, as a teacher at the Jess Schwartz Community High School. She was the first female rabbi to serve in the US military and currently holds the rank of Colonel in the United States Army Reserve. Read more about Rabbi Bonnie Koppell.

Creating a World Without Bullies

R Shoshana Kaminsky — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:40:36 -0400

Jacob Gives Gifts to EsauThe following is an excerpt from a sermon I gave on Rosh Hashanah called, Bible Bullies. You can read the sermon in its entirety on my blog:

The pediatrician who supervised the assessment that our son had Asberger's Syndrome broke the news to me gently as though he was waiting for me to burst into tears.

But the son I brought home that day was the exact same child I've loved his entire life. In receiving the diagnosis, Bobby (my husband) and I strode right past denial, anger, bargaining, and depression and went straight to acceptance of Yonatan's condition. What we really wanted to figure out was how he was going to make his way in the world.

The answer to that question appears to be, “With difficulty.” Yonatan is spectacularly imaginative, awkward in his speech and movements, and very obviously intelligent. In short, he is the kind of kid who's just asking to be picked on. One of the early books I read on Asperger's Syndrome offered two hundred cheerful tips on raising children with the condition. But in the midst of the author's optimism and good humour, she reflected darkly on the school experience. School, she commented, was something that children with Asperger's Syndrome could only suffer through, not enjoy.

The closest thing she could offer to a ray of hope was the observation that kids were only in school for a relatively short period of their lives, and then they could get on with the work of enjoying themselves. I was not impressed. I want Yonatan's school years to be something more than a misery that will eventually pass, and I'm sure all parents want the same for their own children.

Read the whole sermon.

The Open House - An Example We Must Follow

Rabbi Brant Rosen — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:15:05 -0400

The Open House in RamleFollowing is an excerpt from a sermon I gave on Rosh Hashanah. You can read it in its entirety at my blog:

I will confess I that there are times when I fall victim to this cynicism as well. Like everyone, I’ve often been overwhelmed by the knowledge that the systemic roots of these problems are just so enormous, so pervasive in our world.

Still, I cannot surrender the conviction that individual actions do indeed make a difference in our world, and that such actions such as these are occurring around the world, every day, every moment, every second, in ways we often cannot quantify or understand.

I simply cannot shake the image of Dahila as a young woman standing at the threshold of her house, deciding in that one split-second to open the door to Bashir – and how that decision changed not only their lives, but the lives of many others who they could not possibly know.

In its way, I think this image of the open door might be a powerful one spiritual metaphor for own disempowered age. That regardless of the rise and fall of the events of the world outside – and if history is any guide, they will continue to rise and fall – we can still choose to open the door to the possibility of connection, of healing, of peace in our world.

Read the whole sermon.