Rosh Hashanah 5763 FNC Toronto September 7, 2002

Doing the Right Thing

Our Jewish tradition has always been realistic about the human propensity to choose evil in virtually every situation where it is possible for us to do so. To the consternation of many who look to the Bible for models of righteousness, virtually the entire Tanakh can be viewed as a record of God's utter failure, at every stage from Adam and Hava through the destruction of the Temple, to convince us to be obedient and behave ourselves. Building on the biblical model, the entire system of teshuvah which we take part in every Yamim Noraim is set up with the expectation that we will make bad choices for which repentance will be required. There's a reason why Jewish perpetual calendars have Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur slotted in for the next 1,000 years - the assumption is we're going to need it! For on these days our tradition asks us to stand in glaring, unflattering light before a merciless mirror, and see ourselves as we really are. Imperfect. Flawed. Sinners. Hopefully, repentant sinners full of regret and contrition. But sinners for sure. So whether we look at the Bible, or at our Teshuvah system, we see that a booster club for Jewish virtue our tradition certainly is not.

It therefore comes as something of a pleasant surprise when a biblical character emerges as a model for doing the right thing, and it's with this character that I'd like to begin my remarks this morning. I'm going to look to him for some guidance as we look back on a year in which questions about Doing the Right Thing took on more urgency than ever and as we usher in a year of uncertainty in which we can only anticipate more urgent dilemmas coming our way.

The character I've been thinking about, perhaps surprisingly, is Joseph. I say surprising because as we all know Joseph is anything but a model of unblemished virtue in Sefer Bereshit. Pampered and insenstive as a boy, powerful and manipulative and assimilated as a man in Egypt, Joseph certainly has his baggage.

And yet there was at least one shining moment in his life when Joseph was in a position to do something wrong and chose instead to do something right, and for that he earned the moniker Yosef HaTzadik. I refer to the incident in Potiphar's house with his master's wife. You'll recall that Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt. There he became a servant in the house of Potiphar, and his master's wife quickly became attracted to him. Joseph resisted her attempts at seduction and thus spurned, Mrs. Potiphar falsely accused him of attacking her.

The rabbis, ever the cynics, were so amazed at Joseph's restraint that they portrayed a Roman matron asking R. Yosi very doubtfully, Efshar Yosef ben shva esreh shanah haya omed be-chol chum-o, ve-haya oseh hadavar hazeh? "Is it possible that Joseph, at seventeen years of age, with all the hot blood of youth, could act thus?" (BR 37:6) And all that R. Yosi could do in response was open up the Book of Genesis and show the matron other places where the Torah did not censor stories about sexual violations, like the story of Judah and Tamar, to prove that had Joseph in fact caved in to temptation, it surely would have been reported. R. Yosi did not even attempt to base his defense of the Torah's veracity on Joseph's virtue or righteousness because, presumably, that would have been too incredible to believe.

But now we get to the part that really interests me. How did Joseph decide to do the right thing? What gave a ben shva esreh b-chol chum-o, a randy 17 year old, the strength to avoid sin, even putting himself at great peril by doing so?

Here Rav Huna provides a fascinating answer in the name of R. Mattena. In fact, Joseph had every intention of committing the sin says R. Huna. But at the last moment, ikonin shel aviv raah vetsanan damo, "He saw his father's face (lit: icon) and his blood cooled" (ibid, 37:7).

Think about what Rav Huna is saying and what he isn't saying. That at the precise moment of choice between good and evil, what steered the young Joseph in the right direction was an image that flashed before him of his aged father in faraway Canaan. It wasn't halakha that kept him on track. He didn't suddenly realize that what he was about to do was forbidden by Jewish law. Or transgressive according to some abstract moral sense of what was good and evil. It wasn't even God who deterred him, at least not directly. Rather, it was ikonin shel aviv, it was the image of his father's face which cooled his blood. For me, this translates as a powerful sense of wanting to comport oneself in such a way that would make oneself and one's family proud and not ashamed. A visceral sense of pas nisht. A gut feeling of Feh. That's what welled up in Joseph. Was his father's face a psychological projection of his superego? Was it sent by God? Does it matter, as long as it helped Joseph do the right thing?

I'm going to maintain that the reason we do the right thing does matter. The way we get there counts. Going with our gut the way Joseph did is sometimes necessary in a pinch, but it is ultimately not the model that Jewish tradition proposes for us as we go about our ethical decision making. And no task could be more important for us at this juncture between 5762 and 5763 than figuring out how to do the right thing.

5762 has been a year in which issues of how we decide to do the right thing have taken on supreme importance for us as Canadians, for us as Jews, for us as a Narayever community, for us as individuals. The year began with an extraordinary sense of moral clarity in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Unadulterated evil hadn't struck North Americans so close to home in such a massive way in decades, and in those early days most of us were too busy trying to wrap our heads around what it all meant to really analyze our response. Seeing before our eyes the icon of our fathers and mothers who had resisted evil militarily during WWII, and who had helped contain Communism during the Cold War, most (though not all) of us instinctively supported an aggressive response to this new menace.

Similarly, when it comes to our response to the ongoing war of terror that has been waged on the citizens of Israel in 5762, we have properly recoiled with instinctive horror. How could people with grievances, however just, deliberately target innocent civilians time and again? Families riding on a bus, students in a university cafeteria, people shopping for fruit at a market, young people dancing, celebrants at a Seder. How can the world stand by and rationalize the strategy of terror, or blame Israel for responding? Again, ikonin shel avotenu rises up before us, our parents' image, from another time in the not so distant past when Jewish civilians were targeted for mass murder as the world stood by and this ikonin commands us not to let it happen again.

Our sense of pas nisht , often derived from the values and experiences of our parents, may help determine our reactions to other issues as well, including one that has been very close to home for us at the Narayever in 5762, namely the issue of same-sex celebrations and marriages in the shul. On this issue as well there is very often a visceral response. For some in our community that response is a visceral pas nisht - it doesn't belong in the shul, keep it private. For others, the response is equally visceral, with images of Martin Luther King or Susan B. Anthony looming above us, icons of equal rights in other struggles, helping to determine our position on this issue.

What I want to ask you to think about with me this Rosh Hashanah are the advantages and disadvantages of what I'm framing as the Yosef in Mrs. Potiphar's House Model of Jewish Ethical Decision Making. The ethical issues before us as a society, as a people, as a community, as individuals are especially profound this year - we should really have a clear sense as to how we're coming to the ethical conclusions we're coming to, how we derive our sense of right and wrong in such a complicated world. On the one hand, we can certainly say with relief that this model, the gut level, shame-powered model, worked in Yosef's case. From a utilitarian point of view, it is clear that seeing that image of his father in his mind's eye helped him to do the right thing, helped him cool his jets and stay out of Mrs. Potiphar's clutches.

I see, however, two very serious shortcomings with this Joseph model, as effective as it might have been for him in this situation. First, can we be sure that our parents' image will always steer us in the right direction for our own circumstances, which are often very different? And second, even if we're quite confident in our own parents' righteousness and virtue, when we have to make decisions as a community or as a society we're going to be dealing with other people, whose gut responses may point them in other directions. So when we have to make decisions as a group, invoking our parents' image usually fails to persuade.

I'm reminded of the story of the great Tzaddik, Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk, who went one Friday afternoon to the mikveh as was his custom, and met there a Jew who had come all the way from Hungary to spend the Sabbath with him. Seeing that the man didn't recognize him, Rebbe Elimelech asked, "You took the trouble to come from so far away just to see this idle faker, this liar, this make-believe Rebbe?" "How dare you?" the Hungarian Jew replied in anger. "How dare you slander a saint and sage in Israel?"

In the evening they met again, but this time in the Rebbe's house in the presence of his hasidim. The visitor was petrified, and begin to sob, asking to be forgiven. "I did not know, Holy Master·" he said. "Dry your tears," the Rebbe reassured him. "You told me your truth and I told you mine."

We each have different truths, that's what makes resolving issues together so hard. But if we acknowledge the multiplicity of our truths we realize that simply saying something is The Truth isn't enough, even if we repeat it 1,000 times. After stating our conviction as to what we think is right, we still have to persuade, clarify, articulate, respond to other points of view. And this process requires more than just ikonin shel avoteinu.

Let's go back to some of the examples I brought and see how this plays out. First: the war on terror. It's a year later now, and many of us are asking some hard questions. Al Qaeda and the Taliban seem no less evil, but the world does seem a lot more complicated. What has been achieved in Afghanistan, and what has not? What is our responsibility in the rebuilding of Afghanistan and helping it transcend warlordism? Have all necessary measures been taken to avert or minimize civilian casualties in Afghanistan? What can we do to safeguard our civil liberties at home as we contend with this elusive enemy? What are we prepared to give up in terms of privacy, in terms of convenience, in terms of our economy, in terms of the militarization of our society and our lives in order to minimize the risk of this happening again? Our gut response of course is, "never again." But that still leaves us with the question, at what price?

These are tough questions. It is possible that going through the process of asking them and responding to them in a nuanced way will lead us to the same overall place as the gut response. I for one remain convinced of the justness of the Afghan War. But I remain troubled by these questions, which are considerably less easy to resolve through absolute categories of right and wrong. I don't find an image of my father helping me to resolve them. He taught me general values, based on his experience growing up as the child of poor immigrants during the Depression and as a soldier in the American army during WWII. But applying those general values to specific contemporary situations can be very tricky.

And consider as well the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is so heartbreaking to those of us who care about Israel. I had the privilege of going to Israel this summer. I went to study with fellow rabbis at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. I also went because I felt I needed the experience of being in Israel at this time. My sense of myself as a Zionist and a Jewish leader required me to go, and to feel something of what Israelis are experiencing, for however short a time.

I came away with many thoughts and impressions, but one of the most powerful things that I noticed was that there is still a vigorous debate within Israeli society about the right course to take in the conflict. Despite the two years of intifada they have lived through, Israel still has a right and a left, because the issues on Israel's plate don't yield obvious answers. People's ikonin are telling them different things, as they have always done since the beginnings of the Zionist movement. One person's father-image is telling her never to trust the enemy, never to give an inch because they'll only use it to drive us into the sea. Someone else's father-image is telling him that a Jewish state founded in the aftermath of the Shoah needs to be concerned about the suffering and the rights and the dignity of the Palestinians, for their sake and for ours.

The debate in Israeli society raised by the horrific loss of civilian life in the Gaza assassination of Shehada has crystallized and clarified the tension in the internal Israeli conversation about how to proceed. There's little sympathy for Shehada himself, someone who masterminded many terrorist attacks against Israelis and who doubtless embedded himself among civilians specifically to deter an Israeli attack. But even so, what price should innocent Palestinians pay in order for Israel to achieve the goal of eliminating him? What ethical price should Israelis pay? Dueling father-images won't resolve this dilemma, because what is self-evident to you is not self-evident to me and debates based on the gut reactions of the parties usually lead nowhere. Only politics, fallible as it may be, can hope to yield a coherent policy. Politics - which has become a dirty word but by which I mean here reasoned, informed, pragmatic discourse resulting in a necessarily imperfect but democratic decision.

This perspective has led to my own strong support for the shul's process for deciding the issue of same-sex celebrations in our community. Certainly baruch hashem not a life and death issue like the others I've been speaking about, but clearly one that has touched many people in the shul community over the last year in a very powerful way. If there ever was an issue about which people have a tendency to respond from the gut, it's homosexuality. It's an issue that touches a very deep nerve for most people, one way or another. The whole premise of our Committee on Inclusion is that we as a community shouldn't respond based on the varying visceral feelings of individual members, that we shouldn't respond according to ikonin shel avotenu. Rather, we should engage in a reasoned, coherent, open process of study - study of Jewish sources from the Bible to rabbinic literature to rabbinic responsa to contemporary writings and speakers from all points of view. The goal, as you know, is that our study will yield recommendations for the congregation to consider, and that the recommendations will come along with justifications and arguments for shul members to reflect on before they make up their minds.

A number of people have suggested that there is no point to all this study and reflection because in the end everyone will vote according to their predilections anyway. However, a number of people on our committee have already pointed to the ways in which our study till this point has brought them to a different place from where they started. I personally don't know how it will turn out in the end. I don't know what the recommendations will be, and I don't know what the congregation's response will be. I firmly believe that the decision on such a core value type issue ultimately rests with the congregation as a whole. And I feel equally strongly that when it comes to a difficult ethical and halakhic issue, over which there are deep divisions in society at large, among the Jewish community in general, and in our own shul community in particular, serious reflection, openness, deliberation - this is the only way to go. What do you do when ancient tradition conflicts with contemporary sensibilities and trends? We believe in the importance of tradition; otherwise we wouldn't be here. We also believe that sometimes there is wisdom in what the world around us teaches us, for example the attitude toward women's participation. So what do we do? Well, this is not the first time in Jewish history this tension has come up. It's a clear pattern. So let's look back at some other examples, and let's listen to each other's concerns. As your rabbi, I can truly say that I'm proud of the course our shul has taken in facing this issue openly and not just responding from the gut. I have great confidence this path will lead us to the right decision for our shul.

Ultimately of course, reflection and consideration is the route our tradition chose to take in its continuing attempts to help us figure out how to do the right thing. Our tradition didn't want to rely on the apparitions that might appear to us, as helpful as they might be in giving us hizuk in individual circumstances. Rather, the tradition chose the path of law, which always requires process, and deliberation, and interpretation, and a balancing of competing values. I think in this regard of the famous story in the Gemara, Masechet Bava Metzia, about Akhnai's oven. In a dispute between R. Eliezer and R. Yehoshua over the ritual purity of a particular oven, R. Eliezer invokes a Bat Kol, a heavenly voice, to affirm the correctness of his position. And indeed a voice from heaven immediately booms out and confirms that R. Eliezer is right. But the rabbis find this heavenly evidence inadmissible; it is up to the human court working through its own legal processes to determine the ruling. Only law can resolve issues in the human realm, not heavenly visions or voices.

Jewish tradition also chose the path of teshuvah, which is not an epiphany model but rather a hard-work model by which we slog it out day after day, trying to do better, learning to tolerate our weaknesses even as we try to overcome them, learning day by day from others whose insights and experiences may be different from our own, learning day by day what really makes us tick when we strip away all the masks and the poses and the illusions that we employ to help us make it in a tough world.

I have no doubt that 5763 will yield its share of ethical dilemmas. The war on terror continues with no end in sight. An Iraq war seems to be looming now as well. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict tragically shows no sign of abating, and the difficult ethical dilemmas over how Israel should respond will no doubt remain before us. With the economy so volatile and the potential for contraction looming, ethical choices over the allocation of limited resources become even more stark. Canada will need to decide if it can afford to sign the Kyoto protocol, or if it can afford not to sign. The horrific murder of David Rosenzweig right here on Bathurst St. may, or may not, portend an increase in the danger to local Jews, and the community will need to decide how to manage the uncertainty and the fear, how to react without overreacting. Close to home as we've seen, our Narayever community will be asked this year to decide on its policy toward gay and lesbian celebrations in the shul. And who knows what other issues will come before us?

In the Torah portion that was read this morning, Avraham faced an agonizing ethical choice. Sarah was telling him to expel Hagar and her son Ishmael from the home, because they were endangering Yitzhak. Avraham felt that this step was wrong; Ishmael was his son too, and expelling them might lead to their deaths. How to negotiate the conflicting demands of a blended family - this is not a new dilemma! We face many others in our contemporary lives - how to balance our own legitimate personal needs with those of the other people in our lives for whom we're responsible? How to balance professional obligations with family and communal responsibilities? How to live with other people, whose flaws and imperfections are so obvious to us? These are tough questions which yield no easy answers (although with regard to the last one, I recently read about a man who was married for 60 years and who was asked the secret of a happy marriage. He replied that every morning he wakes up, looks at himself in the mirror, and says "you know what, you're not such a prize either!").

Avraham was fortunate of course in that God spoke directly to him, told him what to do, and assured him that the outcome would be ok. In our day, God communicates much more subtly. We are responsible for making determinations as best we can without any assurances as to how it's going to turn out. This is a heavy responsibility, and so we want to make sure we go about making those decisions in the best possible way. We can't know how our descendants will evaluate our decisions. We can only do our best. In this regard, I like the following quote from JRR Tolkien:

Yet it is not our part
to master all the tides of the world,
but to do what is in us,
or the succor of those years
wherein we are set,
uprooting the evil
in the fields that we know,
so that those who live after us
may have clean earth to till
what weather they shall have
is not ours to rule

No, despite Kyoto, we can't rule the weather our descendants will face, nor master their tides, even though we know the decisions we make today will affect them in ways we can't even imagine. That's scary, but it is our existential reality. All we can do is our imperfect best. .

My prayer as we usher in this new year is that we will hear the voice of our gut, give it its due for it certainly will not be ignored, trust it in a crisis as Yosef had to do, but also learn to move beyond it, to move beyond ikonin shel avotenu. I hope that in addition to our gut, we will find other resources to help us make our decisions on whatever comes before us in a reasoned, deliberate way - open to hearing different points of view, prepared to dialogue with the texts of our tradition and with each other. That, I believe, is our responsibility as members of a society, a people, a community. I hope we can live up to it.

Rabbi Edward Elkin RH Day Two 5763 Sept. 8, 2002

The Second Tent

My story today is a story of two tents. Both tents are featured in the Torah, both play crucial roles in the religious life of the children of Israel as they journey through the desert. One ohel moed, one tent is by far the more famous. It stands right in the center of the camp. It is part of the Mishkan, the tabernacle which was constructed by the great artisan Bezalel, and built with the contributions of the people. When God wanted the Israelite camp to remain stationary, a cloud hovered over this Tent; when God wanted the camp to move, the cloud lifted. The Tent was surrounded on three sides by various levite clans, and on the fourth by Moses, Aaron, and Aaron's sons. In the sanctuary adjacent to the tent, the kohanim performed the sacrifices commanded by the Lord. This was the location of the Holy of Holies, which only the High Priest could enter on one day of the year - Yom Kippur. Into the enclosure of the Tent itself only Moshe could go, and this is where he received communications from the Lord. In short, this Tent stood at the center of Israelite religious life for decades. In its capacity as the dwelling place of the Lord among the people of Israel, it possessed tremendous sanctity and needed to be guarded from the defilement of the impure. It was a powerful and fearsome place, a place not to be messed with, one of those rare places where the Transcendent Diety burst through to the human realm.

But there's a second tent as well reported in the Book of Exodus. Though it gets a lot less press, it served what I will argue is an equally important function. It was also a place where God and Humanity met, but it was of a very different character from the first. U-Moshe yikah et ha-ohel ve-nata lo mihutz la-mahaneh, harhek min ha-mahaneh, ve-kara lo ohel moed, ve-haya kal mevakesh hashem yetze el ohel moed asher mihutz la-mahaneh. "Now Moses would take the Tent and pitch it outside the camp, at some distance from the camp. It was called the Tent of Meeting, and whoever sought the Lord would go out to the Tent of Meeting that was outside the camp" (Ex. 33:7).

This tent too is called ohel moed, but did you catch how different it was from the first? Where was this tent pitched? Not at the center of the camp, surrounded by layers of holy people who are there to protect it from the masses, but rather mihutz la-mahaneh, outside the camp altogether. And who went to this second tent? Not just Moses and Aaron, but kol ha-mevakesh hashem - whoever is seeking the Lord. Anyone from among bnei Yisrael could go to that tent and establish her own direct spiritual connection to Hashem. There was no priesthood here, no elaborate ritual, no sacred appurtenances of silver or gold. It was a tent -- modest, simple, on the periphery of the camp. So peripheral that one could read Exodus 33 and not even realize it was there. If you blink, you miss it. And yet that was the place where the people could meet God.

* * *

I've been thinking about the two tents a lot this year, because it seems to me that in these two tents are represented two different models of religious life which remain as alternatives even in our own day. The first model: centralized, professional, formal, beautiful, awe-inspiring, yet - despite its presence right in the center of the camp, very distant from the life of the simple Yid. The second model: open, unguarded, populist, devoid of pomp or formal ritual of any kind, barebones. Despite being harhek min ha-mahaneh, at a distance from the camp, this was the most accessible religious place for the people.

Interestingly, Moses too speaks to God in the second tent. In fact it is there that he has his most intimate encounter with God, panim el panim, kaasher yedaber ish el re-ehu, "face to face, as one man speaks to another" (Ex.33:11), to quote the Torah's daringly anthropomorphic image. When Moses would go out to the second tent for these encounters, the Torah tells us that all the people would rise and stand, each at the entrance of his tent, and gaze after him until he entered The Tent. What motivated this tribute the text doesn't tell us, but the feeling I get is that when Moses goes out to the people's tent he is affirming that despite his holiness, and despite his status as a navi, and despite his ability to speak to God panim el panim -- at the end of the day, he is still one of them. As when a royal or a prime minister or a baseball hero or a movie star plunges into the crowd to shake hands. We're moved by that bridging of their world of riches and power and glory with our much simpler world. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg imagines "the hungry gaze of the people" as they watch Moses walk to the second ohel moed, their simple people's tent, from the vantage point of the entrances to their own tents. For Zornberg, such a powerful moment provokes in each person, in their own existential solitude, a process of revision, or teshuvah. To quote Zornberg, "The image of the camp as a constellation of tent-flaps, each holding its occupant, its gaze, compellingly conveys inwardness as a general experience." (The Particulars of Rapture, p.440).

I've been thinking a lot about these tents this year because I've been asking myself what the High Holidays are really about. Is the ideal experience of the Yamim Noraim closer to a First Tent experience, or a Second Tent experience?

If it's the first, then the emphasis and the energy should be on those of us in charge mounting a really professional, uplifting service on behalf of everyone else. Every ritual would be carried out in the proper way, because only those with knowledge and credentials would have access. There would be an atmosphere of awe in the room, as the ancient formal rites of our people are carried out in accordance with tradition. These rituals would be situated at the very center of our lives, the most public place in our community.

If it's the second, then the emphasis and the energy should be not on those of us in charge but on the subjective experience of every individual present. We in charge wouldn't be doing the ritual on your behalf. Each person would be here, levakesh et hashem, to seek God in her or his own private way, based on the very individual journey they've been on over the last year - the friendships made or broken, the scholarly and professional goals achieved or not, the loves that were kindled, nurtured, or that died, the health problems contended with or overcome, the loss of loved ones experienced, the ethical quandaries faced, the sins committed, the temptation to sin overcome, the deep fears - for one's own safety and well-being, as well as for those we love, the anger - at those who would harm us, at our loved ones, at God, at ourselves. All these are second tent stuff. They are the stuff we think about when it's just us and God - no clergy, no rituals, no trumpets blasting, no stained glass windows, no masks. The communal nature of what happens in the second tent model is limited to that gaze from our own tent flaps, the inspiration we gain from seeing others walk the walk to the tent. But the power only happens when we are moved by that inspiration to emerge from our own tents and seek God ourselves, privately, at a distance from everyone else in our lives.

So what are these days, first tent or second tent? As a rabbi, I can say that as hard as it is to stage a good Tent I experience for you these days, and it does take a tremendous amount of work and skill to do so, my experience is that facilitating a good Tent II experience is yet much harder. The author Anita Diamant speaks of the danger of rabbis becoming people's "spiritual or religious chauffeurs, taking them only where they want to go, avoiding any turn that takes us through the slums." If that's what these Yamim Noraim services are for you, a chauffeur driven ride through the country or through Beverly Hills, then we will have failed. You've got to take the wheel at some point, and take a tour through all the neighborhoods you've been in in the last year. I hope some of them have been nice neighborhoods, but I imagine if you're human that you spent at least part of 5762 in the slums. And these days are designed to help you tour all the places you've been this year, and learn from them all. The places of love and the places of loneliness. The places of pride and the places of shame. The places of accomplishment and the places of failure. The places of courage and the places of fear. If we attempt to do all the work of getting you to these places, not only will we inevitably fail, but we will be colluding with the infantilizing trend that has characterized and compromised so much of contemporary Jewish religion. For we can, at our professional best, move you through our words and our music and our poetry. But if these holy days don't at least point you in the direction of the places you need to go on your own, then the moment we're gone, the moment the fast is over next week and everyone has wished each other a good year, then there's nothing left to sustain you until next Rosh Hashanah, because everything has come to depend on us, and we're gone.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur at their best consist of a merging of the two tents. These days are about the public ceremony, performed in a beautiful and professional way in accordance with our traditions. We need that. We need the structure of Jewish time, the limits and the boundaries which Judaism helps us to mark. On Rosh Hashanah almost 6,000 years ago God created the universe by imposing structure on the formless void, the tohu va-vohu, molding the earth into an orderly habitation where life could flourish . And based on that model, Jewish tradition has been giving us structure ever since. That's what all the "thou-shalts" and the "thou shalt-nots" are about, the clear lines between what is permitted and what is forbidden, and that's what the structure of the Jewish year is about as well, with all the Shabbosim and yomtovim so cherished by our people whether they observe them or not. And so we've got the official Torah readings today, and we've got the shofar, and the piyutim, and the white robes, and the fixed liturgy prescribed by the machzor. These are all Tent I things that do have a tremendous amount of power for us because the structure of which they are a part is so ancient, and because our tohu va-vohu lives need structure. And while the JCC gym would probably not be described as being a place of splendor, I hope that in many ways the ancient ritual and the music and the community you find here in such numbers will inspire awe in you.

But these days are also about the private stuff that goes on in each of your hearts as you reflect on where you've been and where you're going. We don't have a separate tent for you to go to outside for that private stuff, but each of you can find that place for yourselves to come closer to God, inspired I hope by what you've seen and experienced here.

I often have occasion to speak with people who haven't done much with their Judaism since becoming Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Although they probably wouldn't articulate it this way, it often sounds like what really turned them off was that they experienced Judaism as a purely first tent phenomenon - long on pomp and formality and structure, short on intimacy and accessibility, completely unable to deal with the subjective experience of the individual.

Why have we found this subjective, second tent, aspect so difficult? At least three reasons that I can see: First is our legacy from our ancestors: we are heirs to a fixed liturgy. As Rabbi David Hartman has observed, the new bridegroom, and the mother who has just buried her child, both recite the same Amidah. How can the same liturgy be applicable to people who are at such different spiritual places? The instinct of our tradition has always been to guard our fixed common liturgy and trust that individuals in all their variety and at all their different stages of life will be able to pour their own subjectivity, their own neshamas, into these common prayers, deriving both the sincerity of personal meaning and the comfort of community from those shared words. But it's not easy for everyone to find that personal connection in our ancient Hebrew prayers.

The second reason, following closely on the heels of the first, is that even if we decide we want shul to be at least in part a second tent experience, most of us lack confidence as to how to do second tent effectively. Where I used to live in North Carolina, one of the local rabbis decided one year to go up and down the aisles Oprah style during High Holiday services, and ask people to stand up and talk about their personal experiences during the year, and what things about themselves they wanted to change. Some people found it the most moving experience they had ever had at a yontif service, because people really opened up. Others absolutely hated it, also because people really opened up. Tent II is by definition a hard thing to do in a communal setting.

But the third obstacle to experiencing these days as truly personal opportunities to connect with God is probably the most important. It has to do I believe with the resistance each of us brings to exposing the illusions and the fantasies and the errors of the previous year, for that's what the subjectivity of these Yamim Noraim entails.

Here's my list, inspired by my teacher Rabbi Sandy Ragins, of some of those hard-to-hear illusions which get stripped away the moment we enter the second tent.

The illusion that life is supposed to be easy, and that we were born to be happy.

he fantasy that love conquers all, and that when you hurt someone a simple apology will make the pain go away.

The error that if you wear enough armor you will never get hurt, and that it is possible to survive without the love and the trust of at least one other person.

The illusion that there is such a thing as a fully functional family or a perpetually blissful tension-free marriage.

The poignant, pathetic illusion, which parents all harbor, that we have the power to make our beloved children happy and to protect them from all harm.

The illusion that you can be a good Jew even if you don't study or know anything or believe anything or do anything,and the error that you can have a Judaism worthy of the name without a central commitment to the creation of a just social order.

The fantasy that a Judaism built only on fuzzy, feel-good, pleasurable emotions is worth perpetuating, and the error that to be a person of faith, you have to throw away your mind and abandon reason.

The fantasy that our Jewish community should be able to meet all our needs, even without our participation or our contribution.

The illusion that figuring out what it means to be a "traditional-egalitarian" Jewish community will ever be easy, and the error that it's not a wonderfully exciting project to do that figuring out together.

The uniquely Jewish fantasy that everyone is out to get us, the equally false notion that nobody is out to get us.

The error that Israel can afford to be weak, and the error that Israel can ever be a truly just and thriving Jewish society while dominating another people against its will.

The illusion that in this world there is no hope, and that change and healing are impossible.

This is my list as we inaugurate 5763; you can each make your own list of the illusions and fantasies and errors that will be exposed the moment you enter the Second Tent, your own list of the masks and poses that will be stripped off. Each of us needs to ask when we're inside, what kind of person am I? What are my values, my real values, not the ones I talk about, but the ones I actually live by? What gods do I worship? What is expected of me? How have I failed to live up to those expectations? Whom have I hurt? What must I do to atone, to change? Why do I suffer? These are hard questions to ask, which is why the second tent is so, so hard for us to enter.

As the rabbi of the First Narayever Congregation, I am truly delighted that you have all come in such great numbers to our JCC service. People have arrived here from many different places. Some of you are active members of the shul; some of you are checking out our services for the first time, some of you come regularly to our High Holiday services here at the JCC. Some of you stand on very firm Jewish foundations - you know and feel comfortable with your ritual practice, your place in the Jewish community, your spiritual connection to God, your attitude toward Israel. Others of you may be exploring. You aren't sure exactly where you fit in, or what role your Jewishness should or could play in your life. And of course there are as many other variants as there are people in this gym. I'm proud that the Narayever can offer a service, under the leadership of Rabbi David Weiss, and with the help of so many volunteers from the shul, which help so many different kinds of people feel included as we gather together once again to celebrate the beginning of a new year. An easy year of course it hasn't been.

This week we will commemmorate the first anniversary of Sept.11. In many ways, we in North America are still reeling from that tragedy. And any chance we had during the year of regaining some sense of normality and balance was surely eliminated by the continuing horrific violence against civilians in Israel, which has been so terrifyingly random, and yet which has become so tragically predictable throughout the year. We stand on very uncertain terrain this Rosh Hashanah, with an American war on terror still ongoing and perhaps about to take on new targets, an Israeli-Palestinian conflict which seems to always be at the boiling point, an economy whose volatility can make even the most optimistic observer feel nervous, a corporate scandal which makes us doubt the extent to which we can trust some of the most respected and venerable institutions of our society, a renewed sense of vulnerability to anti-Semitism in the wake of incidents here at home and around the world. We never know what the new year will bring of course, yet somehow this year seems harder to pin down than most.

And if our society is characterized by uncertainty, so are our own individual lives -- as we go about our tasks trying to balance our family and professional obligations as best we can, trying to be good, ethical people in a confusing world, praying for health and good fortune for ourselves and for those whom we love in a world where these things are never guaranteed.

One of the ways in which our tradition is such a gift is that at uncertain times like these it gives us something ancient, something solid to hang onto. Our tradition is not unchanging of course. It would have withered away centuries ago if it had remained static in the face of new circumstances and new needs. And yet most of us are drawn here at least in part by a powerful attraction to a set of rituals and to a corpus of texts and to a framework of ideas which our people have carried with us for a long long time, in many different places, often in settings even more perilous and insecure than our own. We are also drawn, however, at some level, by the opportunity these holidays provide in the midst of busy, pressured lives, to dig way down deep and find a place of personal connection with the holy.

My message to you this year is to overcome the natural tendency to passivity. Remember, quantum theory has proven that there's no such thing as being a simple observer. Every one of you, by virtue of your simply being here, has changed this experience for us all. So while you're here take in all the Tent I stuff, connect with the ancient ritual, derive comfort from the structure. But then, take a spiritual walk down the path to Tent II levakesh et hashem, to seek God in the most personal way. You will, in ways that are hard to describe but nevertheless very real, derive encouragement and strength in your individual quest from the rest of us, and your engaging in it will in turn inspire and strengthen others in ways you might not be able to imagine. Shanah Tovah.