Tonight we begin anew. We stand in the Presence of all that is good and clear and holy, and we open our hearts. In this Presence, in the clear light of this new year, we look at ourselves and at our world. Tonight I begin again. This is the beginning of a new cycle for me as leader.And I stand here before you and among you, very simply. I stand here not as a star, And not in any act of greatness.But because in my heart, I want and need to be here. Standing here is both very simple and very difficult this RH. The simple part is that I am profoundly happy to be here tonight and to be coming back to this congregation, whatever your name is. New name, old name, no name. (Tomorrow we will deal with all that.) It is the spirit of this community that I know and love, I feel it to be strong, and vibrant, and sincere. And any community that has a resident theatre group to laugh at itself even in the midst of abject pain, is very special. I return to you with gratitude and humility.And I bring with me an invitation:The invitation is that together we return to the clear ideals and open heart that first prompted us on our spiritual journey, in this community or any other. I invite you to join this caravan of seekers, not of knowers, to join a community of people who are willing to live from the heart, to struggle for integrity, and to stake ourselves on what is timeless and true in our ancient tradition.And to actively renew what is not timeless and true.

As Rav Kook, the first chief rabbi of Israel, said:In our day, what is ancient must be made new, and what is new must be made holy." The Jewish mythos is in a state of radical change, Our Our work is to study and bring into relevance the noble truths of our ancient tradition, But our new insights and promptings must be integrated too, made holy by wedding them to our sacred practice. I invite you to a community that (in the words of my friend and teacher Roly Matalon) INSPIRES and REQUIRES. inspires with its ideals, its joy, and the teachings of a living Torah, AND requires of us to give back to the world, to live the ideals, to study and grapple, to move beyond our comfort zone and show up. (two words) at whatever level we can, for as much as we can, show up for ourselves, for others, but show up. And that leads me to the difficult part of standing here this year:In the Presence of God and in the clear light of these New Year candles, we cannot but recognize that our world is in deep trouble. Do we avoid talking about it on RH? Many rabbis will choose to look the other way. It’s so festive and beautiful here, why ruin it? But if we don't, we risk our souls, and the spirit fire that we so desperately need to see by. Because there is not one of us here who does not harbor at some level, a deep anxiety about the fury and the danger that is smoldering in our world.

The question I am asking is How do we show up in a world so full of fury, so out of control, so full of suffering without falling into guilt, despair, paralysis? Without losing our joy? Or in the words of Stephen Levine, how do we keep your hearts open in hell? This year, with this question looming over me, preparing for RH was challenging. I found myself looking for hopeful, heart-warming stories, looking for words that might offer temporary relief from our unprecedented moment in history. But I was not given permission to go there.Nor was I allowed to take refuge in my own favorite pastime of rendering psychological analogues out of HH texts. Any torah text without a window on the world fell flat; every psychological insight I came up came out sounding like psycho babble. It was as if some heavenly hand kept turning me back. You don’t get to go here this year.

OK, I asked, so what then? Where do we go? How do we approach RH this year in a meaningful way? When it would be so much more comfortable not to mention the discomfort outside our lovely walls. Not to mention that we are 2 years after Sept. 11, and 2 crushingly expensive forays into the Middle East later that have crippled our neediest; not to mention that with all our efforts, we have succeeded in breeding more, not less, hatred, terrorism, impoverishment; Not to mention that our planet’s immune system continues to be weakened, showing up in radical weather changes, new diseases, and millions of children being orphaned; So much more comfortable not to mention a year of unspeakable suffering and trauma on both sides in our beloved Holy land and no hope in sight.

How do we show up with our hearts open in the midst of all this, without sacrificing our joy and our good fortune at having this community, this heritage, this beauty? I asked and I asked and the answer came, unequivocally.This year, I heard, we must look squarely at the world without fleeing the wreckage. This year, while we celebrate, we must open our hearts to the immense pain and the immense beauty both. This year, as we sit together, uniting the power of our souls, the very act of turning back to the Source of Life MUST be different. When we sing: Zochreynu l’Chayim, remember us for life, oh power of life, we sing it as our bobbes and zeides did, but more than our tune must change to keep that prayer alive. The intention must also change. Our concept of LIFE must change. We must be ready to insure that more than we continue to exist, and yes, more than our own tribe. More than ever before our lives cannot be separate from what is going on beyond the sacred/lovely walls of our shuls and temples and churches around the world. If this RH we come to pray only for our own lives, then the word life has lost its meaning. Then the word CHAYIM, life, has become a flat and prosaic single noun. Then the word Chayim is no longer the indivisible, ocean of life, the ancient Hebrew word that cannot be taken out of plural form.

This year, as our ancestors have done for thousands of years now, we come once again to celebrate our sacred legacy. To stand in our truth and pray for meaning, pray for sanity, pray for our lives, and the lives of our children and parents. As our ancestors did for generations before us, each of us must come before the altar of truth to give thanks for our lives and to do the interior excavations that will bear light in our souls, to peel back the husks that have grown around our hearts, to return home to our truest selves.But if while we are doing this, we are not ALSO extending our awareness to the narrative on the other side of our own story, to the life and pain on the other side of our walls, whether the wall is the concrete divider in the Holy Land, or the psychic divider in our own small community, then we are missing a critical point and we are singing about but not really connecting with Elohim Chayim, the God of Life, the God that created us all.This RH we will ask to be given another year of life, to receive the compassion of the Universe. Yet if we are here only to receive life and not to pledge life, only to speak the words of forgiveness but not to look into the face of our adversaries and see their pain, then we are caught in the most pernicious illusion going, that we are here, independent of one another, not bound together in the bond of life, with a common human destiny.For each of us, showing up with an open heart in a world of despair will mean something different, for some of us the work will be more private and close to home, while some of us be called to serve in other parts of the world. In a community that is spiritually alive, every one is listening within to discover how God might best use us as an instrument of healing and beauty.

In the end I did find a brief text from Torah that seemed to speak to our situation. It is a parable from the Second century, Shir HaShirim Raba, Midrash on the Song of Songs. In it: R. Azaryah said: This is like a king who had planted a luscious garden with rows of date trees, vines, pomegranates and apples, and he turned his garden over to one of his servants and departed on a journey. Later, when the king returned from his journey, he found his garden in shambles, unrecognizably overgrown with weeds and thistles, barren of fruit or fragrance. Furious, he took out the tools with which to destroy the garden. But as he began to raze it to the ground, he discovered a single rose. When he lifted the rose and smelled its fragrance, he was gladdened.The midrash ends here. It does not say whether the garden was spared or not. I think the answer lies with us, that we are writing the ending with our own lives. As with all Jewish texts, we are left with questions: What is the small and beautiful planting that God will find worthy in the midst of our world’s wreckage? What tender and fragrant act of love will we leave behind to help balance our world’s despair? And what act of the heart will you choose to nurture and grow in the midst of the bedlam of our world, if you are granted one more year of life?