Today We Are Reborn, Yom Kippur Sermon 5784
Today we are reborn. We have reminded ourselves that we live life outwardly and inwardly. We have joyously welcomed in our spiritual New Year. We took the steady steps of Teshuvah, of return, towards ourselves and our community over the last ten days. And today, we stand ready to commit ourselves to our vision of our best selves.
As Rabbi Alan Lew of righteous memory says, Judaism has a “layered mindfulness.” He wrote: “According to the Kabala, we start out with our awareness in Asiyah–the world of physicality, the world of the body, our most immediately accessible reality. Then we become aware of the heart, Yetzirah–the world of formation, or emotion, that shadowy world between conception and its realization in material form. From there we move on to the world of pure intellect, Briyah, or creation, and then to Atzilut, the realm of pure spiritual emanation.” (This is Real And You Are Completely Unprepared, p190).
The Four Worlds of Kabbalah exist within us and around us. They describe the layers of our consciousness. They describe the ways we can choose to engage with prayer, with ourselves, with our community. We can build our muscles of awareness for our own emotions, and deepen our connection to our own intellect, and then make space for purely spiritual experiences. I’m not talking about reading books or becoming a PhD. I’m suggesting that we each have passions that allow us to pursue our own depths. Maybe you’re a dancer. Maybe you are a person who appreciates music. Maybe you have a deep connection to pop culture. Whatever it is, dive deeply into that and allow yourself to move beyond the physical, into the emotional and spiritual aspects of your passion. With mastery will come moments beyond words, beyond the intellect entirely. The spiritual goal of Jewish mysticism is connecting with Atzilut, with that world beyond words, the world of spiritual emanation.
Then again, maybe spiritual empowerment is not your jam. I totally understand that not all of us are looking for spiritual experiences. Some of us love community, full stop.
So what are we doing to make time for our community? Can we draw healthy boundaries with work in order to make space for ourselves, our families, and our wider communities? What does leisure time mean to us?
Community time shouldn’t feel like work and it shouldn’t feel like a chore. Ideally, our communal spaces allow us to live into our authentic selves. This is something I’ve heard a lot from members of Temple Israel. They feel like they can relax and just be themselves when they’re hanging out here. It’s why everyone is so eager to “get back to normal.” Not just here at Temple Israel, but around the world. Social interactions are a defining aspect of the human experience.
More than anything, Temple Israel is a space for Jewish community to thrive. You don’t have to be born Jewish. You don’t have to identify as Jewish yourself. As long as you want to be in Jewish community, you’ll find something for you here.
Can we allow ourselves the opportunity to experience Sacred Community? Can we acknowledge that being together in a Jewish space is about more than just hanging out? Can we make time for deep conversation? Can we honor our souls while we honor our elders and our children?
What does it mean to make time for our souls? Does anything we do feel soulful? Is a music concert or a play our only opportunity for living into our depths? What would it mean to insist that our spiritual community be a place of soulful interaction? How would that change our participation in prayer services? Could it lead us to consider meetings from a different perspective? What would it mean for our willingness to be publicly Jewish if the Jewish we do in spiritual community actually spoke to us on a soul level?
Have you read about the rise in anti-Jewish sentiment in America and felt helpless to stop it? Do you know that our children in middle school and high school are less likely to publicly admit their Jewish identity, out of fear? Did you know that some students find the idea of fasting while going to school easier to manage than taking a stand, outing themselves as Jewish, and ceasing from participation in school for a single day?
If these statements concern you, we need your participation in the Jewish Roundtable of Alameda Unified. Whether you are a community member or a parent of a student at a public school or a charter school, we need your voice. We need you to consider holding space with us during our monthly meetings, the third Wednesday of the month at 7pm on Zoom. Email me for more information. The single most important thing we can do publicly as Jews is help create the local culture shift needed for our children to feel safe to express their Jewish identities. Make no mistake – it’s not just college campuses where our kids face anti-Jewish discrimination. It is happening in elementary, middle, and high schools.
Obviously, we can’t change the wider culture alone. So we need to show up for our fellow citizens. Consider volunteering for the Temple Israel booth at the Alameda Pride event on Saturday, October 14.
Do you know folks who are engaged community members at the local level? We’re trying to gather local leaders to co-develop a Day of Learning and Planning here at Temple Israel. It’s vitally important that when we approach the wider community to learn about the rise in anti-Jewish sentiment, we create a space where our concerns are put into a wider context. This way, we can develop allies and deepen our work. Let me know if you want to be involved in this effort, which I volunteered to lead on behalf of the Alameda All Faiths Coalition, a coalition of more progressive faith communities in Alameda.
Please remember, my background as a labor union organizer, peace activist, marketing executive, and co-creator of leadership organizing software means that my first impulse is to jump in and help do the work that needs to be done to create a more equitable society. Yet, I never intend for my leadership to supersede the space for others to step forward. We need our entire community to galvanize on behalf of our children. And we need to be willing to hold space for a variety of opinions, both within the Jewish community and within the wider community, on why we’re experiencing a rise in anti-Jewish behavior and how to effectively minimize it.
If you know a Jewish student at Alameda High School, please encourage them to join the Jewish Student Union. And if your child is in eighth grade or higher, consider enrolling them in our Teen Program inaugural year, led by our school director, Jenn Levine.
Remember, Jewish school should not be seen primarily as the ticket to a B’nei Mitzvah. We offer religious school for kids in grade TK through seventh grade because character development and Jewish community deeply enrich our children’s lives. Under Dr. Levine’s direction, our school is holding space in a brand new way. Given how much our children have been through in the last few years, they all deserve the opportunity to process their emotions in our spiritual community and learn Jewish values to help them live into their best selves.
If you live in Castro Valley or Oakland or another East Bay community, we encourage you to invite Temple Israel to participate in local activities. We know our membership extends beyond the city limits of Alameda. But as every member of our staff is part-time, we aren’t able to reach beyond this city if we don’t have volunteer help.
Another way we are looking to renew Temple Israel is by engaging Jewish musicians. At this time, we cannot afford to pay for musicians to participate in our Friday night services. I am hoping we can restart our community band. I deeply appreciate musical help to bring joy into our prayer gatherings.
I hope you will take some time today to think about how you want to make space for your soul in the year to come. It is so countercultural to create healthy barriers between work and leisure time. Rest and relaxation are as important to our souls and the Soul of the Universe as any amount of Busyness is.
May we each have a clear vision for the renewal of our lives. And may we seal ourselves into that vision today. G’mar Chatimah Tovah.
Yom Kippur Shacharit, Morning Service, sermon delivered at Temple Israel of Alameda in 5784.
Image by Yves from Pixabay.