Dear Friends,
It was so nice being with many of you on Rosh Hashanah. My thanks to all of you who came, organized, davened, called pages, gabbai’ed, read Torah and Haftarah, blew shofar, and otherwise took part. It does take a village to make our High Holidays happen, and I’m grateful to all who helped.
I’ve been thinking a lot of late about our holy objects, many of which are in use this time of year. We have many holy objects – siddurim, chumashim, yahrtzeit plaques, gravestones, havdallah sets, tallit and tefillin, shofar, lulav and etrog and so much more. At my previous shul in New Jersey, the yahrtzeit plaques each had bulbs on either side of every individual plaque. It would’ve been too much work for me to go through them each week, though I decided early in my tenure there that on each Rosh Chodesh, the beginning of each month, I would go through all of the plaques and update the lights accordingly. It was by far and away one of the holiest things I did there. It felt as if I was connecting in some way to the people whose names I was reading. When I finished changing the bulbs, I would look around the beautiful sanctuary and recite the el maleh memorial prayer for them. It moved me each time. Our holy objects have such power to move us, if we let them.
As I did before Rosh Hashanah, I just spent over an hour straightening the chumashim and machzorim in the sanctuary. You might ask, with all I have to do before Yom Kippur, why would I take the time to organize the books?
My answer is that these, too, are our holy objects, and they deserve to be treated with sanctity. It always bothers me when I see our holy items laying on the floor or tossed haphazardly into a bookshelf or in the seat backs in the sanctuary.
I wonder why it is that so many people will sit for hours in a service designed to increase our level of connection and holiness, and then won’t take an extra five seconds to place their books lovingly back where they belong in a neat and organized manner? Why do people leave their talleisim on the seats in the sanctuary and not return them to the cabinets where they belong? Why, when I go through and reorganize the sanctuary (which I try to do every few months), do I always find candy wrappers from bar-mitzvahs and even worse, used tissues? Who do we think is here to clean up after us?
You might say to me, rabbi, why are YOU doing this work?
The answer is that someone needs to, and if not me, than who?
I feel strongly about treating our holy books with love and respect.
If that means it’s on me to organize them, I am more than happy to take the time to do so (and, truth be told, given how much time I have to think about deep matters on this job, it’s nice to have some easy work to do every now and then).
I know we live in a disposable society, where most people don’t think twice about the environmental consequences of the garbage we create with single-use items. I also know that this dynamic happens in every shul in the world. And yet, our tradition invites us to recognize the interconnectedness of our actions with all life and to remember that it is no one else’s job to clean up after ourselves.
I invite all of us to think about the objects of our heritage. How do we use them? Do we give them the level of respect they deserve? Do we treat objects differently than we treat people? If so, why or why not?
I don’t mean to guilt trip anyone and it’s not my goal to make any of you feel bad about this. I would, however, like us to think about the consequences of our behavior.
Our holy objects give us many moments of meaning and insight.
Let us return the favor when we use them.
This Sunday morning at 10 am will be our annual memorial service the cemetery. It is a tradition to visit the graves of loved ones between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
My teacher Reb Zalman taught me that if the grave of your loved one is too far to visit, you may visit any Jewish cemetery and ask someone buried there to convey a message to your loved one. Having not visited my own mother’s grave in New Jersey in a few years, I find that a helpful idea.
Also, as in previous years, we’ll be giving you the opportunity on Yom Kippur to anonymously confess your sins. If you have a sin you’d like to get off your chest, we’ll have index cards and pens available during the Yom Kippur dinner.
The box for collection will be outside the sanctuary.
It’s always interesting to hear other people’s expressions of remorse. It reminds me I'm not the only one who has been less than perfect in the past year. If you find yourself in the same category, I invite you to be a part.
This Shabbat is known as Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat of Return, which means it’s time for my annual rendition of the repentance joke!
Join us tomorrow morning at 9:15 for services and I’ll be sure to include it.
Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tova,
Rabbi Ilan
PS Some of you have asked for copies of my Rosh Hashanah sermons. Here they are:
https://images.shulcloud.com/877/uploads/Rosh Hashanah 5777 Day 1.docx
https://images.shulcloud.com/877/uploads/Rosh Hashanah 5777 Day 2.docx
