Yom Kippur Morning Sermon

Temple B’nai Tikvah, Calgary, Alberta; 2016/5777

There’s something in this box that I’m very excited to show you today, but we’ll get to that a little later.

First, I’d like to report to you that I am having a great time serving as your rabbi here in Calgary. I’ve been here for just over three months now, and in that time I’ve come to learn my way around town so that – at least with the help of my GPS – I can get anywhere I need be. More important, I’ve gotten to know many of you, and those of you I haven’t met I hope to have the opportunity to meet soon. In general, as the weeks go by, I’m feeling more and more settled in to my new Calgary life.

The one area in which I still feel unsettled is the bibliographic one. At my home in Washington State, I had a wonderful library in the basement in which I had organized every one of my 3,000 or so books by topic, and then alphabetically by author. Better yet, I’d created a database on my computer which held all the information about each volume – its shelf number, where and when I’d gotten it, a picture of the cover, etc. It was a work of art, that library. Its beautiful oaken shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, incandescent lighting made it glow with warmth, there was a nice work area hollowed into one corner of the room, and in another corner, was a waist-high stand holding a globe that looked resplendent even though I never used it.

Moving here to Calgary, while great in every other way, wreaked havoc on my library. The shelves in my office down the hall are plentiful, but they only afford me enough space for about half of my books. The other half are at home, and those that are here got all jumbled up in the move, rendering my beautiful computer database useless in locating particular volumes. Now, unlike before, a volume of, say, biblical commentary might find itself shelved right next to a book on modern Jewish history, a volume of rabbinic literature might be sandwiched between two books on mysticism, and a philosophy book I need might not even be in my office at all but instead be on one of the shelves in my basement at home.

It’s horrible, I tell you. Horrible! (And the waves of sympathy I feel coming my way from you now are simply overwhelming.)

One of the books I was able to find, however, is the one in this box, but more about that later.

In many ways, as you know, books lie at the very heart of the Jewish people. Other religions try to hear the voice of God when they pray. With us Jews, however it’s different. Traditionally, prayer is the way we talk to God, not the way God talks to us. To hear God talking to us, we turn to the old books. As the great Rabbi Louis Finkelstein once put it, “When I pray, I talk to God. When I study, God talks to me.” For Jews, the book – the written word – is the conduit through which God communicates to the Jewish people, and to individual Jews.

It’s been like this from the beginning, you know. It was, after all, a book that God dictated to Moses at Mt. Sinai – the Torah, God’s greatest revelation to our people. Judaism teaches that all of the great truths of the world are contained in that book. Do you want to know what God wants, Judaism says – do you want to find great wisdom? Don’t cloister yourself off in prayer, or climb to a mountaintop shrine, or even sit in silent meditation. Do you really think that you can solve the problems of the world by sitting on your tuchus and thinking? No! Open the book and read the wisdom. Thinking is good too, of course, but only at great peril do you ignore what our sages who have already struggled with the great questions of life can teach us.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to note that when writing was first invented, the rabbis hated it. In late antiquity, Jewish scribes started writing down what their rabbis were teaching, and many of their rabbis howled in protest. The rabbis saw their greatest work as teaching “Torah,” but to them, “Torah” was not writing on a page, it was what happened when teachers and students sat down to learn together. In person. To them, Torah was an activity, not a text. It was students learning at their teachers’ feet, hearing the passion in their teachers’ voices, asking questions, and growing in wisdom not only from their teachers’ words, but also from who their teachers were as human beings. You could record the words of the old texts onto paper or parchment, but that sparkling experience of true encounter could never be expressed in writing. Writing, they feared, would ossify learning – freeze it into old stale old words rather than spectacular encounter. The great first century sage, Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai, was quite direct about his concern. “Those who write down legal traditions,” he said, “are like those who burn the Torah,”

The rabbis’ complaints about writing were about as successful the Rangers were against the Bluejays last week. Jews needed writing, because without writing, everyone was all over the place. Without writing, for example, worship services, were different in different places. If you were a Jew who lived in ancient Calgary, and you traveled to visit your cousin in ancient Winnipeg, chances are that you would hardly understand anything that was happening at services in Winnipeg, because without a written prayerbook there was no standard form of worship, and other communities’ services would be almost completely different from your own. Also, without writing, the rabbis’ teachings had to be transmitted by word-of-mouth, and that too caused lots of big problems. Before there was a written record of what they said, Rabbis got misquoted all over the place, and this not only made for some very unhappy rabbis, it also caused all kinds of misunderstandings as to what Jewish law was supposed to be. Eventually, rabbinic teachings grew too voluminous to transfer by word of mouth. You might not believe this, but sometimes rabbis can be very verbose. Pontiffs might pontificate, but rabbis “rabbificate.” And they do it a lot. In time, remembering all that they said – all of those hours and hours of rabbification – became more and more difficult, and eventually impossible.

In short, Judaism in the pre-writing era was an utter mess, which is why by the late second century, even those curmudgeonly rabbis couldn’t prevent Jewish texts from being written down. They recorded a collection of their teachings into a work called the Mishnah– a gigantic corpus of rabbinic teachings divided into six large sections called orders, and 63 individual tractates, addressing everything from blessings to brisses and sacrifices to sukkahs. A few centuries later, they added a huge set of commentaries to the Mishnah, called the Gemara, and then they put the Mishnah and the Gemara together into an even larger work called the Talmud – 5,724 pages of pure rabbinic joy in today’s standard edition. Those ancient and medieval rabbis also wrote prayerbooks, and philosophical treatises, folklore collections, and anthologies of case law. Soon, Jewish bookshelves filled with these treasures, sagging like contented smiles under the weight of the books’ collected wisdom.

One of those works is the book in this box, but we’ll get to that.

Writing, we should note, not only recorded a lot of good material, but it also brought our people together – in a very real sense, it put them all on the same page. What is it that unifies the Jewish people? Even more than our shared history, even more than our memories of oppression and suffering, even more than shared religious and national identities, it is the written words of our shared literary treasures that unite Jews everywhere.

Still, even with writing, it was a little messy. For over a millennium, books weren’t printed, they were written by hand. A single book could take months to create, and as a result they were very expensive and not readily available to most Jews. Plus, the scribes who created them often made mistakes, and sometimes those naughty scribes threw in little zingers of their own to make the text read the way they wanted it to. Even the bible differed from place to place, not to mention the Talmud, prayerbooks and other such works.

But then printing got invented. The Guttenberg Bible was printed in the 1450’s, and within a couple of decades, printing technology had begun its sweep through the Jewish world, too – first in Spain, then in Italy, later in Germany, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. Printing standardized these texts even more than writing had, and perhaps even more important, it made books affordable, allowing even un-rich Jews to get their own. Nowadays, no Jewish home is complete without Jewish books on the shelves.

With all of that background, let’s take a look at the book in this box, shall we?

But first, let me tell you how I got it. Several years ago, when I lived and worked in Tacoma Washington, I had as members of my congregation the widow, daughter, and son-in-law of a rabbi named Maurice Feuer, who had died a few years before his family moved to town. At an oneg after services one night, the family came up to me and said, “Rabbi, you know, his books have been gathering dust in storage ever since he died. Would you be interested in them?”

What I said was, “Why yes, thank you, I’d be very interested in seeing them.” What I thought was “You had me at ‘books.’”

A few days later, ten boxes of books showed up in my office, and I rolled up my sleeves and dove in. Many of them were mid-20^th century works, some of which I was delighted to receive, because they filled gaping holes in my library. A few were older – enticingly so – usually works of rabbinic literature printed in Eastern Europe during the late 1800’s.

And then I came to this book.

<Show Book>

I didn’t know what it was at first; all I knew is that it looked sexy. And I wanted to get to know it really, really well. I cleared some space on my desk, set it down, opened it up, and turned to the title-page.

For me, seeing the frontispiece of an old Jewish book is just as exciting as feeling that slight push-back into your seat as airplane is about to take off, or getting the first glimpse of the deep green grass and the ivy when walking out into the summer sunshine at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. It is a thrill beyond words.

In this case, I looked at the title page and saw what you can see now on the numbered side of your handout.

Here on top – Number 1 on your sheet – it says “Tractate Rosh Hashanah.” from the (Number 2 on your page) Babylonian Talmud (there were actually two Talmuds – one written in Babylonia, the other written in the Land of Israel. Of the two, the one from Babylonia is far more widely studied). The big red word in the middle of the page – number three – says that it was published “B’Amshterdam” – in Amsterdam. A little bit below that (at Number 5), it says that it was “Printed in the year, ‘On that day, he shall blast the great shofar.’”

What could that mean? What year is it talking about?

Well, remember, Classical Hebrew has no numerals, only letters. As a result, Hebrew uses letters to refer not only to sounds, but sometimes to numbers, as well – aleph is one, bet is two, gimmel is three, etc. And if you look carefully at this line of (Number 5) Hebrew, you’ll notice that some of the letters are larger than the others. When you put the numerical value of the larger letters together, you get the number of the Hebrew year when this book was published. It was an encrypted way of including the publication date. To finish the job, all you have to do is total the number of the large letters, add 5,000, subtract 3760, and you can get the English year of publication. Simple.

So I put these letters into that formula: I added up the numbers, and got 512, added 5000 and got 5512, subtracted 3760 and got 1752. This book was published in 1752.

Immediately, I emailed Dr. David Gilner, director of the Klau Library at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. “I have what looks like an 18^th century Dutch Talmud here,” I said. “What am I supposed to do with it? Does it need to go into a rare-book room or some other special holding facility?”
“Oh, that sounds like a Proops,” he replied.

“A what?”

“A Proops.”
“OK…I’ll bite…What’s a Proops?”

“Proops was the name of a prominent Dutch Jewish printer in the 1700’s. It sounds like they’re the ones who published your book.”
“Then, I looked more closely, and I saw a small line of print on the title page – Number 4 on your sheet. “Printed at the publishing house of the honorable Mr. Joseph, the honorable Mr. Jacob, sons of the late honorable Mr. Solomon…Proops.”

“The book isn’t worth a whole lot of money, Dr. Gilner said, but it’s a wonderful volume. Hold onto it and show it to your students and congregants – they’ll love it.

***

Rosh Hashanah isn’t the only tractate in this book – in fact, there are several. The next one after Rosh Hashanah, as you might imagine, is called Yoma in Aramaic – The Day – the most sacred day. In other words, Yom Kippur.

Since it is Yom Kippur, and since we do have this book out today, I’d like to take this opportunity to study some Talmud with you. What we’ll study is study from the very beginning – the first Mishnah in the tractate. I’ll be starting with the ornately framed word on the top center of the back side of your sheets.

The rabbis in this tractate are writing about how Yom Kippur was to be practiced in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Now remember, the last Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, and these rabbis were doing their rabbi-ing mostly during the second century – 100 or so years later. Their belief was that the person who would rebuild the Temple was the messiah – so Yom Kippur in the Temple, what they really were discussing was what was going to happen when the Messiah comes.

Seven days before Yom Kippur, they take the high priest out of his home and bring him to the Chamber of Counselors.

On Yom Kippur, one of the High Priest’s most important Jobs was to go into the Holy of Holies – the innermost sanctum of the Temple – and there recite the four-letter name of God. He was the only one who really knew how that name was pronounced, and even he only uttered it once a year. If anything went wrong at that moment, it was said, the whole world would have been destroyed…and that would have been a bad thing. (High Priests, you see, are just like nuclear engineers and brain surgeons – you never want to hear them say “Oops.”)

So, to make sure that he was completely ready, they took the high priest away from his house and family a week beforehand to prepare him.

Then they appoint another priest to act in his stead in case something happens to render him impure.

Since the priest’s job was so important, he had to be in a state of absolute purity to perform his job when Yom Kippur came. Now remember, by Yom Kippur, the priest would have been away from his home for a full week. That means that he also would have been away from his wife for a week. And, as you know…sometimes when men are alone…late at night…especially when they’re away from their wives…during the hours when dreams tantalize and entice…certain things can happen to men’s bodies which, if they were to happen to the high priest, would render him… “impure.” So they needed to appoint a backup – an on-deck or on-call high priest – who could be called up at the last minute in case he was needed.

Rabbi Yehudah says “They even appoint a new wife for him in case his wife dies.” For it is said, ‘He shall make atonement for himself and his household.’ (Leviticus 16:6) His household? That means his wife.”

Here, Rabbi Yehuda says that they don’t just need a backup priest for the high priest, they also need a backup wife for him. Why? Because in the book of Leviticus the bible says that the High Priest is supposed to atone “for himself and his household” and who, Rabbi Yehuda reasoned, is the High Priest’s household if not his wife? In order to fulfill this commandment to atone for his household, in other words, the High Priest needed a wife…and if God forbid Mrs. High Priest should die, they needed somebody who would be willing to step into the breach at a moment’s notice.

The High Priest’s backup wife – how’s that for a job?

They said: If thus, there is no end to the matter.

In other words, Rabbi Yehudah’s rabbinic colleagues said, “Yehudah, c’mon! That’s ridiculous. What, are you going to appoint a backup to the backup wife? Or a backup to the backup to the backup wife? If you go there, you’ll never be able to stop, and eventually you’re going to run out of eligible women.

***

What amazes me about this is that here we have rabbis living in the Land of Israel almost 2,000 years ago, sitting and debating Torah – words said to have been written thousands of years before that. The Temple had been destroyed a century or so earlier, and they’re talking about what to do on Yom Kippur when the messiah comes and rebuilds it – and they’re doing so in the present tense! It’s almost as if they’re saying, “When the messiah comes and perfects the world…like, next Tuesday…he rebuilds the Temple, and here’s what happens….” The particular volume from which we’re reading their words was printed more than a quarter-millennium ago in the Dutch lowlands of Europe – I can almost smell the tulips and see the windmills near the print-shop. Who knows who the people were who studied from these very same pages during the 264 years that have passed since. And here we are, right here in this room, at Temple B’nai Tikvah in Alberta Canada, in 2016, on Yom Kippur – the very day that they were discussing – centuries later, studying the very same words from the very same pages. We too are envisioning that glorious future, and guess what – we’re still doing it in the present tense! When the Messiah comes – like, next Tuesday – just imagine what’s going to happen.

A leather-covered book, ancient words, the smell of tulips, and a glowing vision of tomorrow. I don’t know about you, but as we sit here today and let the words flow from the page in to our own hearts and minds and imaginations, I can’t help but think that we touch eternity.

My friends, it is the word – the written word – that binds our people together across vast spans time and space. Where would we Jews be without our books? Looking ahead, let’s recommit ourselves to opening up these old books, to immersing ourselves in their rich, life-giving waters, and, with our help, to letting the letters fly off the page and into the world where they can truly work their magic.

Shanah Tovah

Yom Kippur Evening Sermon

Temple B’nai Tikvah, Calgary, AB, 2016/5777

She is a woman I’ll call “Gail.” She was in her early forties, a mother of three, energetic and active in the congregation and in a host of other activities. People who knew her said that her enthusiasm and exuberance were contagious.

But there was something different about Gail the day she came into my office. When she said hello, her voice wasn’t quite as peppy as usual. Her hair was a little unkempt, her clothes slightly rumpled, and her eyes looked tired…almost defeated.

She sat down, stared at the ceiling for a moment, and then finally spoke up. “Rabbi,” she said, “my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah is next month, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Your nephew’s Bar Mitzvah?” I said. “You know what to do – you bring a nice gift, you go to the service, you stand up and you sit down a few times, you say ‘Mazel Tov’ – it’s easy. You know that.”

“No,” she said, “you don’t understand. My Uncle Joe is going to be there.”

“Uncle Joe?”

“Yes, Uncle Joe. When I was a little girl,” Gail said. “Uncle Joe lived with us for a couple of years after he got out of school. And whenever my parents went out and left me at home with him, Uncle Joe did horrible things to me. Horrible. So horrible that it’s hard for me even to describe them. He told me not to tell anyone, and threatened me with even more horrible things if I did. And until recently, Rabbi, I never said a word.

“Well, eventually,” Gail continued, “Uncle Joe moved out – thank God – and since then I’ve tried to lock up my memories of what he did to me and put then away. But the problem is that, a couple of times a year, I see Uncle Joe at family events. Since I was a kid, he’s never said word-one to me about those things he did, but whenever I see him…it’s like my memory trunk bursts open and all those terrible experiences fly out and attack me again. Just seeing his face makes all of the pain and the terror come back. It’s gotten to the point, rabbi, where I don’t even want to go to those family events anymore.

“And that’s why my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah is an issue.”

Gail sat quietly, looking down at her hands. Finally, I asked, “So, what are you going to do?”

“Well that’s the thing,” she said. “I don’t know. A few weeks ago, I finally told my mother about everything that happened back then. She was mortified, of course – she felt horrible that it happened, and furious at Uncle Joe. But when we talked a few days later, she said, ‘Gail, I’ve been thinking about this. What Uncle Joe did to you…nobody should have had to endure that…and I can tell that you’ve been living with this pain for a long time. But you’ll never be able to be done with this until you can forgive Uncle Joe and move on. He’s obviously not going to apologize, but what you can do, Dear, is be the better person and forgive him so that you can finally put the pain behind you.’

“What she said made sense to me, Rabbi” Gail said. “I do want to let go of all my pain and anger more than anything. But the problem is that I can’t do it. Whenever I even think about Uncle Joe, I go back to that horrible place again, and I have to stop. My mom says I should be the better person, but I don’t think I can that better person….and I feel horrible about it.

“Then,” Gail continued, “I shared all of this with my friend Jill – she goes to the church down the street. Jill agreed with my mom. ‘We talk about this all the time in church,’ Jill said. ‘God forgives us for all of our sins, and the godly thing to do is to find the love within our hearts to forgive those who have wronged us, as well.’”

“And you know what?” Gail asked. “My therapist agrees with them both. He says that as long as I hold onto my anger, then I’m going to hold onto the pain, as well. He says that if I want the pain to stop, the first thing I need to do is to forgive old Uncle Joe and be done with him.

“Rabbi,” Gail said. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried, and I just can’t do it. I cannot forgive that man.

“Does this mean that I’m an unloving person?” Gail asked. “Does it mean that I’m weak? Does it mean I’m bad? What am I supposed to do?”

***

My friends, we in our community have been talking a lot about atonement for the past several days – about what to do when you’re the one who does something wrong. But we haven’t given nearly as much attention to the forgiveness side of the equation – about what to do when you’re the victim of someone else’s wrongdoing. Here, it’s clear that Uncle Joe has a lot of atonement to do (which he probably won’t do at all). But what about Gail? What guidance can our tradition offer her? Should she forgive Uncle Joe, or shouldn’t she?

Well the fact is that, to be honest, classical Judaism doesn’t say a whole lot about forgiveness. This most sacred day of the Jewish year, remember, is Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement, not the Day of Forgiveness. Our tradition places its emphasis not on forgiving others for what they did wrong, but on earning forgiveness for the things that we did wrong. Our focus these days isn’t on what other people have done, but on what we’ve done.

There is some sense to that, of course. As a religion, Judaism’s greatest concern is the perfection of our broken world. And to perfect our world, we’d all do much better to focus on improving ourselves rather than worry about what to do when others harm us.

Nevertheless, Judaism doesn’t completely ignore the question of forgiveness. What our tradition says is that in order for a wrongdoer to be forgiven, he or she first needs to complete a huge prerequisite – and that prerequisite is teshuvah, atonement. For a person to earn forgiveness, he or she has to atone first.

Remember, atonement is much more than saying “I’m sorry.” In fact, atonement – teshuvah, the work that a wrongdoer is responsible for doing – is a five-step process in our religion. You accept responsibility for your wrongdoing, you change your behavior, you apologize, you compensate your victims, and you maintain your change over the long haul. In other words: Own up, change up, ‘fess up, pay up, and keep it up. It’s really hard; it involves genuine change; it demands true humility; and, done right, it demonstrates supreme nobility of character.

If you are the victim of a wrongdoing, Judaism says that you owe the wrongdoer forgiveness only if the wrongdoer is sincerely remorseful, only if he or she is truly changing and is genuinely on the path to self-betterment. If the person is not apologetic, if they’re not changing, if they’re not doing their teshuvah, then you don’t owe that person squat in the forgiveness department.

If a man gets caught having an affair, and responds with a sticky-sweet “I’m sorry” that she can see is a crock, then she doesn’t need to forgive him until he truly apologizes and truly changes. If your mother speaks cruelly to you, and then a few days later, snaps “I’m sorry, now can we go out to dinner,” then she doesn’t get your forgiveness. The little boy who threw sand in the girl’s face at the playground and drones out an “I’m sorry” only because his parents tell him to and he wants them to let go of his arm? He might be off the hook with Mom and Dad, but Judaism says that the little girl with sand in her eyes owes him no forgiveness at all.

And of course, if those who offer phony apologies don’t earn forgiveness, then those who offer no apologies certainly don’t, either. The boss is having a bad day and reams you out for something you don’t deserve to be scolded for. The furniture delivery truck shows up three hours late and the driver doesn’t even say a word about her tardiness. A friend breaks a confidence and doesn’t own up to what he’s done. None of these people have earned our forgiveness, and our Jewish tradition says that we shouldn’t give it to them.

In fact, it goes even further. If someone does something wrong to you, and then offers you either a phony apology or no apology at all, then even if you want to forgive them, you’re really not supposed to. Jewish law doesn’t allow us to let them off the hook until they’ve turned it around. On the other hand, if that person does apologize and you can tell that he or she really is repentant, and really is in the process of change, then even if you don’t want to forgive that person, you really have to.

The case of the philandering husband who offers a lame excuse for an apology is a good example. His wife might very well want to forgive him just then. She might look into his eyes and remember all his good qualities, or she might just feel scared of what might happen if she withholds her forgiveness. But our tradition insists that she hold him to a high moral standard and not forgive him until he’s truly earned it. If, on the other hand he really does offer a sincere apology – one that’s part of a process of real teshuvah – then she really should forgive him even though she still might want to wring the guy’s neck.

Now I hasten to add here that this woman could forgive her husband and still not speak to him…or still not even be married to him. In fact, the rabbis don’t ever seem to have connected forgiveness with connectedness. As far as the rabbis are concerned, you can forgive somebody, but still cut them off and not have a relationship with them. The wife of this adulterous husband could very rightly say, “You’ve wronged me. You’ve apologized. I can tell that you’re sincere and that you’re changing. I forgive you. Now here are your divorce papers. Be on your way.” And on the other hand, if she refuses to forgive her unfaithful husband, she could still stay married to him if she wants. She could say, “You know what, he’s yet not where he needs to be, but I’m not going to leave this marriage so quickly. Yes, he needs to change, and I’m going to give him some time to get there. I don’t forgive him, but I’m still with him…and for now that’s OK.”

Forgiveness, you see, doesn’t necessarily mean making nicey-nice, nor does refusal to forgive necessarily entail the end of a relationship. Instead, forgiveness simply means wiping the debts clean-away. It means saying, “We’re good. You’ve finally done right and no longer owe me. Now let’s move on with our lives and do what we need to do.

In my own life, there are a lot of people who have wronged me and never apologized. I’m sure the same is the case for you. I think they should apologize, and while I still hope they do, most probably won’t. But you know what? I can live with that. They haven’t earned my forgiveness yet, but life is complicated, and in these cases my relationships with them are strong enough to withstand the fact that they still owe me an apology.

I had a great aunt who was killed in a car accident at the age of 19 in the early 1920’s. Apparently she was a wonderful, vivacious young woman, and her death was understandably devastating for her family. From what we understand, the man who killed her made some sort of mistake while he was driving. He wasn’t drunk; he wasn’t overly negligent; he just made a horrible, tragic error. He was also African-American, so without much of a trial, he went straight to prison for a few years. According to family lore, the first thing that man did when he got out of prison was to go to my great-grandparents’ house and apologize for having killed their daughter.

I don’t know how my great-grandparents responded to that man at their doorstep. But I think it would have been perfectly within their rights to say, “Thank you very much for coming, sir. While we can’t speak for our daughter, we can accept your apology for the pain that you’ve caused us, and we appreciate that you’ve come here to offer it. Now please step away from the threshold of our home, and don’t ever come back. We forgive you, and we never want to see you again.”

When it happens – and when it happens right – forgiveness can do wonderful things. It can heal and strengthen a troubled marriage; it can restore important friendships; it can even forge close relationships between people who first met when one wronged the other. So we should forgive and embrace whenever we can. But the bottom line is this: If you want, you can maintain relationships with people who have wronged you even though you haven’t forgiven them. And similarly, just because you’ve forgiven someone, that doesn’t mean you have to remain their friend.

So what about Gail? Her mother, her churchgoing friend, and her therapist all encouraged her to forgive Uncle Joe, even though Uncle Joe had never said “boo” about the horrible things he did to her when she was a girl. In fact, there are a lot of people today who say that we should forgive everyone who has ever wronged us, regardless of whether the wrongdoers have owned up to what they’ve done.

I find that suggestion abhorrent. What these people are saying to Gail is that she should turn to her child-molester Uncle Joe and say to him, “Uncle Joe, when I was a girl, you treated me like a piece of meat. You denied me the respect and dignity that I deserved as a human being, you exploited my vulnerability, and you used me to satisfy your own perverted desires. But ya’ know what? Don’t worry about it, Uncle Joe. No big deal. Let’s just put this whole thing behind us and be friends, OK?”

What kind of person with any moral compass whatsoever would suggest that Gail say such a thing?

But it was even worse. Gail’s mother and friend and therapist all pressured Gail to forgive her uncle. They implied – and sometimes even said outright – that if Gail were a strong and healthy person, if Gail was a good person – she’d forgive this guy. That’s even more abhorrent!  Gail was the victim here – Uncle Joe was the bad guy! And now these people are trying to put the onus of making the relationship right on Gail’s shoulders. They should have felt ashamed of themselves.

The suggestion they made would have been almost laughable if it weren’t so common. Victims today are besieged with this kind vapid nonsense and psycho-drivel telling them that they should forgive anyone who has ever done anything wrong to them. Gail shouldn’t forgive Uncle Joe. She should report him. And she should keep children away from him. And if she ever does decide to speak to him, she should remind him of the horrible, horrible things he did to her when she was a child and not let him off the hook. At least yet – not until he does a whole lot of work to right his terrible wrong

So what would I want for Gail? My hope for her would not be that she could forgive, but rather that she could heal – that she could somehow get to the point where her memories of what Uncle Joe did to her wouldn’t paralyze her with pain like they did when she came to speak with me. I’m not sure how she could get there, but what I know wouldn’t help would be to have her say, “Don’t worry about it, Uncle Joe. No big deal. Forget about it.”

Don’t forgive your wrongdoers who haven’t atoned. Expect more of them. Don’t say “They’re only human, they’re going to mess up sometimes.” Say instead “They are human beings; they have the awesome ability to acknowledge their wrongdoings and make them right, and I won’t forgive them until they do.” The terrible irony here is that refusing to forgive an unrepentant sinner isn’t mean or cruel; it is respectful – deeply and profoundly respectful. To say “I don’t forgive you…at least not yet…not until you’ve righted your wrong” really says, “Yes, you did something wrong to me, but I know you can be better. In fact I insist that you be better and that you fulfill your moral potential, and I won’t be satisfied with anything less.”

Now I can already hear the objections coming from some of you. Already, there are those among you who are planning to come up to me after services and say something like, “Rabbi, you’re not really understanding what it means to forgive. Forgiveness doesn’t necessarily mean telling someone that what they did was OK, it just means letting go of the hurt and the anger inside you.”

Well, if you’re among the swelling ranks ready to say this to me, let me save you the trouble. You see, “letting go of the hurt and the anger,” getting to a point where the memories stop bringing so much pain – that’s not forgiving, that’s what’s called healing. That’s an internal process for victims to do on their own – hopefully with the help and support of loved ones. But forgiving is something that happens in a relationship between two people. Think about forgiveness in terms of a debt. If Sam owes me money, and I can’t get Sam to pay up, I might eventually realize that I’m just not going to get my money back. At that point, it would probably be best for me to write it off – to stop losing sleep over it, resolve never to lend Sam any more money, and move on. I would have let it go; I would have let Sam’s unpaid debt stop gnawing at me, and proceeded with my life despite the fact that Sam is a deadbeat. But I wouldn’t have forgiven Sam’s debt. And even though I might have written it off, if you were ever to ask me afterwards whether Sam owes me money, I would say yes! I would have healed from Sam’s wrongdoing, but I wouldn’t have forgiven him his debt.

Well in Gail’s case, we’re not talking about money, we’re talking about Joe’s huge moral and emotional debt to her. Joe has wronged Gail, and he owes her an apology and much, much more. Of course, he probably won’t ever even try to pay up, and we would all hope that Gail could live a good life despite her memories. But asking her to forgive him is asking her to treat what happened as if it’s all good now, and as if it’s nothing to worry about. But it’s not all good now. It is still something to worry about. It’s a horrible, horrible debt that only Uncle Joe can repay.

Even when we’re subjected to lesser wrongs – when someone cheats us, or speaks hurtfully to us, or messes up our front lawn – it’s good when we can contain our fury or hurt enough to move on with our lives, but moving on doesn’t make the ugly things that these people did OK. Moving on is one thing; it’s an internal process of healing. Forgiving, however, is entirely different. Forgiving is what can happen only when people work together to restore their broken relationships.

In the end, it comes down to this: To suggest that a person should forgive everyone, regardless of whether they’ve earned that forgiveness, is to suggest that we do away with the very notion of right and wrong, for if a person can automatically get off the hook for his or her every misdeed, then we might as well not call anything a misdeed to begin with.

My friends, we are part of a tradition that for many centuries has stood for human decency, and compassion, and kindness – a moral code to which we hold not only ourselves, but other people as well. When you see other people failing to fulfill these great, sacred values, it is up to you to affirm those values. When others smile and tell you to forgive their uncorrected evil, it is up to you to be firm, and say, “No, my friend, you need to earn that forgiveness. You can do better, and you should.” And when they respond by telling you that forgiveness is the ultimate good, you tell them that, no, good is the ultimate good, and that as a Jew and as a human being you will remain unrelenting in your commitment not to forgiveness, but instead to the far more fundamental values of decency, compassion and kindess.

This is what it means to be a Jew; this is what it means to stand for righteousness; and this, my friends, is what I pray we all have the strength to do during this year, and in all other years to come.

Shanah Tovah.

Rosh Hashanah Morning Sermon

Temple B’nai Tikvah, Calgary, Alberta 2016/5777

For many centuries, we Jews have ushered in the New Year on Rosh Hashanah with the blowing of a horn. The shofar. [Show shofar]. And as you know, we Canadians, along with people in other countries, usher in the January first New Year with the blowing of horns as well. [Show party horn.]

I could end my sermon here, but don’t worry, I won’t.

Both are odd customs, if you think about it. The New Year begins, and we start blowing. And in the case of Judaism, we blow for ten days. Why do we do this? What do horns have to do with the New Year?

As for New Year’s Eve, historians believe that the custom of blowing horns dates back to ancient and medieval superstitions teaching that loud noises scare away evil spirits.

But why do we sound the shofar? Well, what the historians said about horn-sounds scaring off the evil spirits may have had some influence over Rosh Hashanah customs, too. But the rabbis identified at least ten more reasons for blowing the shofar on the Jewish New Year. Now don’t worry, I won’t list them all, but I do want to highlight a few.

For starters, the rabbis said that the shofar reminds us of the day when God became Ruler of the World – way back a long time ago. The very first day of creation.

The rabbis also said that the shofar reminds us of several other events in the Jewish past, such as the revelation of Torah at Mt. Sinai and the destruction of the Temples, each of which occurred with shofar accompaniment.

Also, the call of the shofar also marks the passage from one time period to another. These days, when high-school students hear the beep over the loudspeaker, they know it’s time to go to the next class; when traders hear the bell, they know that the market has just closed, and when we Jews hear the shofar, we know that the new year has begun, and that it’s time to buckle down and get to work on our teshuvah – our repentance.

And just as the shofar reminds us of both the past and our transition out of the past, the rabbis said that it also gives us an acoustic taste – a sound bite – of what’s going to happen in the future when the Messiah comes and rebuilds the Temple. When the Messiah comes and the Temple is rebuilt, our tradition suggests, then too we’ll hear the blasts of the shofar.

Creation and other huge events in the Jewish past; the passage of time from that which has already happened to that which is about to happen; and a preview of the Messiah. As I review these reasons for tooting our Jewish horns at this time of year, it occurs to me that they all really come down to one fundamental point. Our tradition insists that we hear the sound of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah (and on Yom Kippur) to pull us out of the present and to see ourselves not in the here and now so much as in the vast span of historical time. In Judaism, the sound of the horn invites us to look to the past – centuries, millennia back – to the very first moments of creation…and to the time when our people stood at a mountain in the wilderness and received the Torah…and to the moments of utter destruction that our ancestors faced in the ancient land of Israel when the first and second Temples were destroyed. It also invites us to look ahead to a better time – to the messianic world, a time of kindness and compassion and joy and light. In other words, the sound of the shofar is supposed to open a window into the past, and also allow us to glimpse the world of our dreams of the future. Today, the shofar calls us out of the now, and into eternity

When we hear the blast of that shofar, we might think that we’re in the present, but if we do it right, we’re elsewhere. And more important, we’re not only elsewhere – in a different place – but we’re also else when, in a different time. When we hear that blast, we’re in Eden, and at Sinai, and in Jerusalem mourning the destruction. And we’re also in the glorious future that will happen when things become right once again. And it all happens with one blast of a shofar.

This, my friends, is far more than mere symbolism. We do exist in more than the present. In fact, we can’t help it – our present existence is nothing but a meeting place of past and future. Eastern religions call upon their adherents to live solely in the present. And, North American life, I’m sure you’ll agree, often teaches us to live just in the here and now, as well. Should you be worried about your health in the future, and be grateful for the God-given gift of your miraculous body? Or, should you just go ahead and live in the moment and eat that deep-fried Twinkie, instead? YOLO, we say, you only live once. Forget past and future – just live for the now. You’ve heard the saying, “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift; that’s why they call it the present.” Could you get any more North American than that?

Judaism says “No!” This kind of fluff – YOLO and “live in the present” and all the rest – is no more than mere hedonism. To Judaism, the present hardly exists. In our religion, the present is nothing but the very narrow, infinitesimally thin line separating past from future.

Did you know that, technically, Hebrew has no present tense? There’s a past, and a future, but in order to speak in the present, Hebrew has to resort to nouns – instead of saying “I am writing,” for example, we say “I am a writer.” And although there are ways to say, “I was” and “I will be,” there’s no way to say “I am” in Hebrew. In the Jewish world-view, the present is so infinitesimally brief as to be all-but-nonexistent. It is simply a line that we can’t help but straddle, with one foot in the past, and the other in the future.

You live that reality every moment. You are, for example, very much your past. Think about it: Each of you (biologically speaking) has two parents, and you have four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and 32 great-great-great grandparents. What that means is that 150 years ago, or so, there were 32 people in the world, many of whom may not have known one-another, who would all play a part in creating you. In fact, there were more than 32 people who played a part in creating you, because many of your ancestors met their partners through a yenta somewhere, so the yentas also played a part in your being here. And many of your ancestors moved to the towns where they met their spouses because someone gave them or their relatives a job opportunity. And those “someones” also get a share of the credit for creating you. Other ancestors may have met at a social club or a political rally, or while visiting distant relatives. And this list grows exponentially. If you think about it, there were probably thousands of people a century and a half ago who knowingly or unknowingly had a hand in creating you.

And that’s only in the past five generations. The math here quickly becomes astounding. If you go back ten generations, you’ll find that, on a single level of your family tree, there were 1,024 people whose destinies would one day converge…in you. And ten generations before that, there were 1,048,576 of them! I’ll say that again: 1,048,576 people. Imagine if they all could gather together one day and surprise you – spontaneously – with a nice greeting or a song or a dance. It would be the flash-mob of a lifetime!

But in a certain sense, each of us is that flash mob – we are each the fantastic, unpredictable, awesome result of what happens when millions of people gather together, with each playing their own role in the grand project called You.

And that’s just the biological part of it! There are forces from the past that act upon you in other ways, too. How did you end up here?

Maybe your ancestors were among the millions who fled antisemitism in Russia, Poland, and other Eastern European countries during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, opting instead for the golden possibilities they hoped to realize here in Canada.

Or maybe you came from Eastern Europe a century later, as an immigrant from the former Soviet Union. Or maybe you’re from a place such as Argentina, whose Jews came here in search of the security and safety that Canada could provide. Or perhaps you’re a Jew-by-Choice, who became part of our people in the context of a host of social, religious and political forces, many of which hardly existed a century ago. Thank God you’re here. Or maybe you’re the non-Jewish spouse or partner of a Jew, whose way here was paved not only by the love and commitment you and your partner share, but also by other awesome and until recently unthinkable forces of history that allowed Jews and non-Jews to marry. Thank God you’re here, too…and thank God you were able to get that Jewish partner of yours to come along with you today!

The forces that brought you here are massive ones, and even those are only the ones that got you to this country or into our religious tradition. What brought you to Alberta? Jews started coming here in the late 1800s as fur traders and merchants. Fleeing persecution, they were drawn this way by offers of homestead land and the support of Jewish immigrant aid societies eager to help them out. By 1891 there were almost 800 Jewish living in the Prairie Provinces, and within 20 years there were almost 1500 living in Alberta alone. Early immigrants worked as farmers and merchants and in other small businesses, and since then the immigration has continued, even at times when Jews faced social exclusion here. The pace of immigration picked up in the 1930s with the rise of Nazism in Europe, especially since by then the growing Jewish community here was able to provide homes for their friends and family fleeing persecution and seeking safety. Some Jews came here for economic opportunity, others to rejoin family members from abroad, and still others simply because they had nowhere else to go. Which were the forces that brought you to this part of the world?

And let’s go even further. What brought you here to this synagogue today? Many of you came because a friend once invited you to B’nai Tikvah and you liked what you found. Or maybe you ended up here because you were looking for a Reform Jewish community in Calgary. Or maybe you came to B’nai Tikvah because your family goes here, or because it was the synagogue that most resembled the one in which you grew up. Or maybe you come simply because it’s the nearest synagogue to your home – the local shul – or because you like the singing, or because of the dashing new rabbi that you heard has just gotten to town.

Whatever it was that brought you, my friends, the fact that you are here – the mere reality of your presence here and the fact that you are sitting in this room, in Calgary, Alberta, in the nation of Canada right now – is the result of a great and epic drama that has thundered through the centuries and put you right in the chair where you sit at this moment. With all of us. Sharing this instant in time. Millions of people have participated in the drama, and you’ve only had the opportunity to meet a few of them in person.

And it doesn’t stop here. No, not at all. In fact, if we look ahead, we’ll see the world of our children and grandchildren. What role will we play in building that world? If we look way ahead…say, 23 generations from now, we can imagine a Jewish child coming into the world who will grow up and someday look back into her past: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents…. She’ll realize that back in the early 21st century there were more than eight million people who would one day become her ancestors. Eight million of them! Today, in 2016 – 5777 – there are fewer than a half million Jews in all of Canada. All of us, therefore, directly or indirectly, are going to have a role in creating that child. (What do you think we should name her?)

We spend our lives worrying about important things – How will our kids turn out? What will our retirement will be like? What will our lasting legacy will be. Yes, to us, our lives seem big. But if you step back for a moment, you’ll see that they’re even bigger.

The call of the shofar, then – the sound reminding us that our lives are only one important scene in a vast and timeless drama, and that the present moment is nothing but the thundering meeting point of past and future – this is a call that we need to hear, and it’s a call that demands our response. The shofar calls upon us to live in both past and future.

Living in both the past and the future is far more than just an intellectual exercise. It means looking at your story – your big story, your multigenerational story, the story of the many forces that brought you to where you are in your life now – and asking what that story means for your future. Many of your ancestors came here as refugees; what does that reality demand of you today? More fundamentally, you’re Jewish; how is the epic story of your past – replete with both suffering and majestic glory – going to influence your life today. And, more specifically, you’re part of a congregation that began as a little group of Reform Jews meeting in Ron and Judy Bing’s basement – a group committed to creating a Reform Jewish presence here in Calgary. What does being part of that story mean to you, and what part are you going to play in the ongoing and developing history of this community?

You only live your life fully as a Jew when you let that past speak to the kind of future you’re going to have. As children of refugees, it is our Jewish – not to mention our human – obligation to work on behalf of displaced people everywhere, and these days there are a lot of them. As children of Israel, it is our job to work on behalf of the people and state of Israel, and to make real the great values of our heritage in every way we can. And as members of this 37-year-old congregational community, it’s our job to ensure its continued strength and wellbeing however possible.

Look at your epic story. Listen to its call. What does it teach you? Where is it leading you? What is it calling you to do? Don’t ignore it; instead, let it push you to fulfill your great destiny as a Jew and as a human being.

You see, to the extent that we are stuck in the present, we are mortal, limited, small. But to the extent that we transcend the present, our lives and our actions become infinite.

The blast of the shofar, then, calls us to eternity – to Eden, to Sinai, to Calgary at its greatest, and to a fantastic world in the future. We hear it every year – Tekiah! – and as we do, millions beckon us from both past and future. We owe it to them to respond to that call, and to make this New Year – 5777 – the best one ever for us and for the fragile world that God has given us.

Shanah Tovah.