Kol Nidre Sermon 2022/5783

By Rabbi Mark Glickman

It had taken several months for me to call Mike, but I liked him, and I missed him, and, frankly, I was kind of exasperated with him, so I finally decided to pick up the phone. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, and finally I got to the point. “Mike, we miss you around here,” I said. “What’s it going to take to get you to come back to services?”

“Rabbi, I’d love to come back,” Mike replied, “but I’m just not ready yet.”

“What do you mean, you’re ‘not ready’?”

I could hear him roll his eyes over the phone. Clearly, I wasn’t the first person with whom he’d had this discussion. “You know what I mean, rabbi. I’m still scared of this virus.”

I tried to be quiet, and I tried to be sensitive to his fears, but I think Mike could hear me roll my eyes, too. I caught myself, and instead tried to be kind and logical. “Look,” I said, “schools are open, workplaces are open, virus numbers are way down, you can wear a mask when you come. What more do you need?!”

“The virus numbers were up this week, rabbi!” In reality, they had ticked up lately, but they were way down from the peak. It was just enough to turn the truth into something messy. “And even if they weren’t up,” Mike continued, “I still don’t think I’d be ready to come back. Rabbi, I’m just so scared of getting sick.”

I could hear the fear in his voice. It was real. Before the pandemic, Mike had been so connected here – he came every week. But now, being in the physical presence of other human beings had become not something to look forward to, but something to dread. It was important that I be sensitive to that.

At the same time, I hoped he could hear me, too. For most of us, the virus had become far less dangerous than it once was. The world was reopening, and people were reconnecting. Sure, there was still a risk of getting sick, but there would always be risk, and our job now is not to avoid risk altogether, but to learn how to live with it. That’s because we need each other – we need to sit with each other, to see each other, to shake one another’s hands and maybe even to hug one another – it was important for us to be able to regather.

And that was precisely the problem. Temple had reopened, but many of the the seats remained empty during services (or at least many more than had been empty before the pandemic). Our community needs one another; we need our Mikes to come back, as well as our Judies and our Davids and our Sarahs and everyone else.

But Mike’s fear was real. And I cared about the guy. How could I be present with him, and also get him back to Temple?

Mike wasn’t alone in being afraid. And he’s far from the first person ever to feel that way. Fear, as you know, is an age-old human emotion. It dates back millennia, to the first person ever to watch their buddy get eaten by a lion. Sometimes, fear can be healthy, like when it inspires us to run away from large, man-eating cats. Fear can make us prudent. It can inspire us to get vaccines, and avoid dark alleys, and stop smoking. But fear, as we also know, can paralyze us. Some people are so scared of the unknown that they stay in soul-killing jobs rather than exploring newer and better paths. Others are afraid of germs, a phobia that, when severe, can be downright debilitating.

Personally, I’m terrified of snakes. And once, when we lived in Washington State, I was weeding around a shed we had in the backyard, when, suddenly, out slithered a garter snake that must have been…[hold arms wide] six inches long. And in response…well let’s just say that that was the last time I ever pulled a weed out from around that shed.

In Hebrew there are two words for fear – pachad and yir’ah – and I think that understanding them might help Mike and me come to a meeting of the minds.

The first of those two words – pachad – could also be translated as terror. It’s what you feel when you round the bend and find a growling bear waiting for you on the other side. It’s what soldiers feel when they’re surrounded by a vicious enemy and realize that the battle is lost. It’s what all those people in monster movies felt when running away at hyper-speed to avoid getting squashed by Godzilla.

Yir’ah, on the other hand, is different. Yir’ah also means fear, but’s it’s often translated as awe. And usually, it’s a good thing. A Jew, for example, is supposed to live life with a sense of yir’at shamayim – a fear of God, an awe of God, a feeling of veneration for God. Unlike, pachad, yir’ah isn’t terror. Instead, it’s wonder. It’s respect. It’s reverence. This is the kind of fear that reminds us that awful and awesome ultimately mean the same thing. When we feel yir’ah, we live with awe. Yir’ah doesn’t make us flee from lions; it makes us appreciate their beauty and majesty, instead. It doesn’t make us afraid of heights, it puts us in awe of them. It doesn’t make us fear things that go bump in the night, it makes us grateful for the mysteries enfolded in each night’s darkness. Yir’ah is the kind of fear that makes us feel small and large all at the same time.

Pachad and yir’ah – each is a type of fear, each is a genuinely human feeling, and each leads to radically different responses. Pachad paralyzes us, yir’ah inspires us. People feeling pachad for others become suspicious of them, and often demonize them; people feeling yir’ah for others appreciate them and feel compassion for them, even though those other people are so different and so puzzling…and sometimes because of it. Pachad makes us run; yir’ah makes us stop and think, with our hearts racing and our jaws agape in wonder. In the short term, pachad is essential, because can save our lives. In the long term, yir’ah is equally important, because can save our souls.

A neurologist might tell us that pachad comes from our amygdala – our inner brain, our lizard brain, whereas yir’ah comes from our cerebral cortex. I might suggest that yir’ah also comes from our heart – the source of our spirit – and that our ability to feel it is one of our most profoundly human traits.

For much of the pandemic, it was pachad that saved us. When it hit, we had to lock down, and we had to do it quick. And if we didn’t run away from the monster, it would have destroyed us. Of course, there were moments of yir’ah early on, too, as we reached out to others, and tried to show kindness from amidst the fear. Still, in the early days of a pandemic, it’s pachad that ultimately saved the day.

That day has come, and that day is gone. The pandemic still attacks, and it is still a threat, but it is no longer the threat that it once was. As a result, we have a little breathing room. We can determine how to be careful, and how to live with our fear. We can act out of a desire to preserve life, but also out of a desire to enrich it. We can move from pachad to yir’ah.

The great sage, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, perhaps said it best when he argued that fear is the anticipation of pain, whereas awe is hopeful and entails the anticipation of good. You’ve experienced both of these even during the pandemic. We all have. The virus terrified us, and to avoid letting it destroy us, we responded with caution and intelligence. Not to have done so would have made things horrible. And you’ve also seen goodness during these past few years. People reaching out in care and love; scientists doing amazing work to protect us; the transformation that can come from sitting quietly at home more than we can in normal times. These are good things, and when we respond with awe to difficulties, this is what we can experience.

To be clear, I’m not saying that we should throw all of our Covid concerns to the wind. What I am saying is that the time has come to respond to its threat not as if it was a lion waiting to pounce on us, but simply as an illness we can get if we’re not careful. It’s essential that we continue to take sensible precautions, but now we can take other factors into account, as well – our need to sit with others, the importance of community, the reality that life always entails risk, and a life fully lived doesn’t reject risk, but manages it, instead.

Mike, if you’re listening to my words tonight, I assume you’re doing so online. Wherever you are, I want you to know that we understand that you’re afraid, but we miss you. And we are incomplete without you. And we hope you come back soon, because without you sitting here, our community remains incomplete. My hope for you is that, with wisdom, courage, and every necessary precaution, you can transition from the necessary responses of pachad fear, to the reverent mode of awesome fear – yir’ah

These are complicated days, and they demand that we make difficult decisions. As we do, may we be motivated by the sanctity of human life, our need for human connection, and courage to do what we must despite the risks that those activities entail. And may the fear we all experience lead us to the safety we need to lay pachad aside and live with awe – yir’ah – for all that is good and holy in our magnificent world.

Shanah Tovah.

Rosh Hashanah Morning Sermon 2022/5783

By Rabbi Mark Glickman

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking about Zionism and Israel. I took seminars on the topic as an undergraduate. I lived in Israel for two wonderful years during the 1980s, my rabbinical thesis was a biography of an anti-Zionist Reform rabbi who gained widespread notoriety during World War II, and who was still alive when I wrote about him. During the more-than-three decades of my rabbinate, I’ve spoken out about Israel-related issues, I’ve drawn criticism for my views, I’ve tried to comfort the communities I’ve served when Israel was under attack, I’ve sat through countless meetings with countless congregants struggling with Israel-related topics. Some of my discussions about that little country that occupies such a huge place in the Jewish heart have been frustrating, others have been uplifting. And they’ve all been spirited.

And then, six years ago, I came here to Calgary, and as I’ve noted from this bima before, here the conversations have been even more difficult than elsewhere. Here, when Israel comes up at a meeting, things can get…a little tense. Here, when I first suggested a congregational trip to Israel, one of the first questions from congregational leaders wasn’t “How many people do you think will attend?” but rather “Will we lose members over it?” Here, people either clam up over Israel perspectives with which they disagree, or they scream at those who disagree with them. “Rabbi,” people tell me, “I don’t feel safe sharing my views about Israel at Temple because everybody is so far to the left of me.” “Rabbi,” others say, “I don’t feel safe sharing my views about Israel at Temple because everybody is so far to the right of me.” “Rabbi, who does she think she is to say that about Israel. I can’t believe it!”

I’ve found it astonishing, actually, because I’ve served at a bunch of Jewish communities over the years, and never before have these issues taken on the heaviness that they have here at Temple B’nai Tikvah. Oh, don’t get me wrong. Israel discussions at other congregations have been difficult at times – plenty difficult – but never like they are here. My rabbinate has seen a couple of intifadas, growing settlements in the Occupied Territories, repeated conflicts in Gaza, the Rabin assassination, the Netanyahu administration, and much more. And believe it or not, there are Jews who disagree with other Jews about these topics. But here, the whole thing seems heavier, more intractable, more difficult to discuss in every which way.

And if you’ve been attending Days of Awe services for the past few years (or at least “attending” them), you know that I’ve been struggling to understand what makes these issues so much more difficult for us to discuss here than in other synagogue communities, and I’ve been encouraging you to engage and argue constructively about them rather than to lash out. I’ve had, to put it gently, limited success.

And so, I’ve continued to read, I’ve continued to listen, and I’ve continued to reflect on this issue, and just recently, I realized something I find fascinating about the way this issue plays out for us. It’s an insight that probably won’t serve as a magic pill to make these discussions easy anytime soon, but it’s one that may provide a helpful framework to guide us in that direction.

What I realized is that, unlike all of the congregations I served before coming here to Calgary, our congregation here in Calgary…is in Canada. And contrary to what I realized before moving here, Canada is different from the United States. And what’s more, Canadian Jewry – its people, its history, its perspectives – is different from American Jewry, too. And these differences are particularly important when it comes to our discussions about Israel.

Put most simply, Canadian Jews are collectively of two minds about Israel. We have two fundamentally conflicting perspectives on that little country along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. And these conflicting views are so fundamentally at odds with one another that the people who hold them end up speaking entirely different languages about what’s going on in Israel. Our discussions over Israel end up tending not to be arguments, but rather cacophonies – as if they were vociferous onstage debates between two people who don’t speak one another’s language.

The first vision that many Canadians hold is a classical Zionist one. It argues that a Jewish state is important to help protect us from antisemitism. First articulated by early Zionists around the turn of the last century, it was the dream of Theodore Herzl and other founders of Zionist thought – to have a place where Jews could move to be safe, and live lives free of oppression, and openly as Jews. And in places such as Eastern Europe, not to mention others like Yemen and Damascus, such fears were real. When any day, your family could be expelled, tortured, or even killed in a pogrom simply because they were Jewish, the dream of having a secure national home for the Jewish people was a powerful dream indeed.

And this, of course, is why that dream of an independent homeland only became a practical reality in the wake of World War II. As the smoke cleared after the Holocaust, and the full extent of its horrible devastation became known, the world perceived as never before the need for a Jewish safe-haven. And in a world awash with needy Jewish refugees, the need was particularly acute.

This was a powerful dream. A dream of a people long subject to the whims of history finally returning to its ancient homeland, there to be reborn free and strong, to be actors in the world, not victims; proud, not downtrodden; self-determined, and never again as weak as before.

What’s more, it was a dream that was particularly important here in Canada, , because most Canadian Jew are descendants of Eastern European countries – places where, certainly during the 19th and 20th centuries, antisemitism was force both palpable and strong. Most Canadian Jews came having left behind relatives and communities and friends who fell prey to the Holocaust. And many others came here after the war, remembering all too well the vulnerability of life in Europe, and the unspeakably tragic loss that it allowed.

This, then, is the first form of Zionism – the classical one. It acknowledges the reality of antisemitism, and sees Israel as crucial in protecting our people from it.

But there’s another view, too. And that’s because, for us Canadians, particularly us out here in the west, the search for protection from antisemitism is far from the whole story. In fact, for many of us – even many of us here in this room – there is another story that has come to sit close to our hearts here, and even though this other story isn’t specifically Jewish, it moves us, and troubles us and inspires us in some ways just as powerfully as our own.

This other story I’m referring to is that of indigenous Canadians. Theirs, too, is a story of oppression and vulnerability. And theirs, too, is a painful one for anybody with even an ounce of compassion to take in.

Yes, for many of us in this part of the world, our defining moral issue is one that is far more local than the death camps of Europe. It’s the need we feel as Canadians to own up to the way we’ve treated the people who were living here when white settlers first arrived. I don’t need to recount that history for you – you probably know it better than I do. What’s important to note, however, is that the story is one of outsiders coming to a place where others had lived for many ages, taking over their land, quashing their culture, and oppressing them as human beings. New perspectives on the history of this country have raised our awareness of this story, as have the tragic recent discoveries of unmarked graves at residential schools, and other atrocities, too. If you have even a morsel of compassion, these stories can’t help but get under your skin.

And what’s important for our purposes here is that our sensitivity to the way we treat indigenous peoples can’t help but inform the view that many of us have of Israel. For many of us here, the story of Israel isn’t at root the story of a people returning to its land to rebuild its national life there. Instead, it’s the story of white people moving somewhere where none of them had lived before, and kicking brown people off the land where they had resided for centuries. In this sense, Zionism isn’t the story of Jewish national rebirth as much as it is the story of European colonization of innocent people…just as horrible as what happened here in Canada.

The classic, Zionist response to this, of course, would be to say, “Wait a minute! Who’s really indigenous in Israel? Jews were there long before Arabs were. If anybody in Israel is indigenous, it’s us, not the Palestinians.”

“Yeah,” would come the reply, “but that was in antiquity. Right or wrong, these people – the Palestinians – were living there for ages when Zionism arose, and now they’ve been disenfranchised.”

“Disenfranchised?” many Zionists respond. “Arabs can be citizens of Israel – they can vote. And the occupied territories were conquered in a war that the Arabs started.”

And thus, the discussion continues, rarely reaching any agreement, rarely achieving any insight.

My point is that one of the primary reasons Israel is so difficult for us to discuss is that, when we talk about it here in Canada, we’re really telling two different stories. One is inspirational and beautiful – the story of the national rebirth of our people like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Holocaust. And the other is the story of colonization and oppression of indigenous peoples just like what happened here.

Which is your Israel story? Is it a story that comes out of Auschwitz, or is it a story that comes out of Kamloops? There isn’t a right one or a wrong story, I don’t think, and in the end neither is more Jewish than the other. Yes, the Auschwitz version is more particular to our own people, but the Kamloops Israel story is Jewish, too – it calls upon us to recognize the divinity of all human beings, and to act toward them with care and compassion. What’s more Jewish than that?

Again, I ask you – which of these stories is yours? I would suggest that you to abandon the one that speaks to you most powerfully, but I would like to encourage you to see and validate that of the people with whom you disagree. You don’t need to embrace their views, but just see the kernels of truth that their story might hold. If, for you, Israel is an exciting story of a Jewish return to the land, maybe you could use a reminder that the rise of a Jewish nation in a land where others have dwelt for centuries is morally fraught and ethically dangerous, even if it is something we need. And if you see the Jewish return to the land of Israel as an act of colonialism that should make us as Canadian Jews feel ashamed, then maybe you can remember the joy of Jewish national rebirth that so many Jews feel after centuries of darkness – the joy of hearing Hebrew words being spoken and songs being sung once again on the streets of Jerusalem and other cities; of knowing that, there, the national calendar is a Jewish one, and the rhythms of time are Jewish for the first time in ages; of knowing that Israel provides an unparalleled opportunity for Jews to guide their own national history rather than forcing them to allow others to do it for them; and that finally, after centuries of vulnerability, there is now a safe haven for our people whenever they might need it.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of civil society is the ability to hear other people’s stories, and to allow those stories to influence our view of the world. Those stories might distort the truth, but far more often than not, they can provide added insight.

Our community here in Western Canada is uniquely rich, and one of the factors that renders us rich is the unique set of stories that our members have brought here. Some have brought us immigrant stories – stories of people escaping hatred for the freedom of this great country. Others bring stories of our struggle to overcome collective responsibility for past misdeeds, as we strive to treat all Canadians with the respect that they deserve as human beings. And most of us bring some combination of these tales and many more as we constantly transform our view of our world as Jews and human beings.

This year, may we hear one another’s stories. May we learn from them. May we allow stories old and new to continue to guide us, to learn from one another, and to make us better each and every moment.

Shanah Tovah.

Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon, 2022/5783

By Rabbi Mark Glickman

Our world pushes us to conform, to be the same as everyone else, to fit the mold, to toe the line, to fade away into camouflaged familiarity and similarity with those around us; to refrain from being red roses shining out from the green, but to be yellow dandelions, instead, just like all of the other dandelions around us.

That’s what the world tends to tell us these days. But about six months ago, in a crowded airport lounge teeming with other travelers just like me, I had an experience that reminded me what a disservice our world does to us when it says this.

Just over a week before, I had gotten a call from two members of our congregation, Elysa and Nathan Morin (I share their names with their permission). They had just had a baby – a healthy little boy they were going to name Finn – like Finkelman – and they were hoping I could officiate at his bris eight days later. I was delighted – this is a terrific couple, they were already great parents to Finn’s older sister, Avery, and hearing the news of their son’s birth was a real joy. I almost shouted my “Mazel Tov” into the phone.

Then I opened my calendar, and my heart sank. How could I have forgotten? “I’m at a conference in San Diego next week,” I told them. “And the day of the bris is the day I come home. There’s no way I can get back in time for the ceremony.” Brises, you see, have to be on the eighth day – even if the eighth day is Yom Kippur, its eighth-ness trumps everything.

I paused. “I’d be glad to try to find another rabbi who could officiate,” I continued. “Or, if you’d like, I suppose I could try to Zoom in from my layover.”

“Rabbi Glickman,” they said, “we don’t want another rabbi there – we want you. If you could Zoom in, that would be great!”

“OK…if that’s what you want,” I said. Secretly, I was overjoyed that I’d be able to be there…and, I’ll admit, flattered that they wanted me to participate as much as they did.

My layover that day was at the Denver airport. No problem, I thought to myself, I’ll just find a quiet place to sit…at the Denver International Airport…and I’ll officiate at the bris over my computer from there. My layover was six hours long, so I figured I wouldn’t have a problem.

I walked off the plane after my San-Diego-to-Denver flight, and stepped into a madhouse. The Denver airport was mobbed. It was as if someone had uncorked the drain of the post-Covid travel delay tank over our heads, and the entire world was gushing out to take a flight that day, every one of which, from the looks of things, went through Denver. It was an international mass of tightly packed humanity. My plan had been to find a quiet place to sit, but I realized that finding a quiet place was going to be impossible. In fact, finding any place to sit wasn’t going to be easy. What was I going to do?

For a time, I wandered the concourse – a roaming, roving, rabbi in search of a nook or a cranny from which to conduct this bris, but every nook and cranny was occupied. It baffled me that the architects who designed that airport could be so completely oblivious to the needs of rabbis doing Zoom brises!

I began to think creatively. Maybe I could see if the nice woman on the loudspeaker could politely ask people to quiet down for a couple of minutes. Or maybe I could Uber out to a Starbucks in the Denver suburbs somewhere. Maybe I could ask an airport administrator to borrow their office. “You see…there’s this ceremony in Judaism…it involves a little surgery…I need to Zoom in….” No, none of these ideas was going to work.

But then I saw it. The answer to my problem. A gleaming, well lit, oaken portal to success, right there in the middle of Concourse C. Why hadn’t I thought of it before. The United Club! It would be quieter, more comfortable, and with six hours to kill, I could get some food and drinks, to boot.

I bought a one-day pass, and was ushered into the quiet – or at least quieter – confines of the airport lounge. There, I got a snack, read my book for a little while, and when the time for the bris drew near, I found a glass of wine that could do a passable job as a Kiddush cup, and sat myself down at a desk in the office section of the lounge.

There were lots of other desks there – rows of them, with people sitting on either side of me and with their backs to me across the aisle. I heard them talking on their phones; I heard them clacking away at the keyboards of their computers. From my left, I heard a man with a deep voice say, “Is this Mrs. Pearson…Yes, this is Jim calling, from FreeFlow Plumbing. You had a question about your drain?”

Then, from the other direction, I heard, “Hey, Vern, there’s two seats over here.” “I’m comin’, Hank, I’m comin’!” was the reply, and two big, scruffy guys made their way to the desks behind me.

I plopped a kippah onto the top of my head, set the glass of wine next to my computer, opened the screen, and booted up Zoom. Within a moment, courtesy of the wonders of modern technology, I was brought virtually into the living room of Elysa and Nathan’s family. Elysa was moving around a little gingerly, but she and Nathan wore smiles the size of the runway not far from where I sat. Their parents were there with them, and the doctor serving as the mohel was getting his equipment ready. And there, in Elysa’s arms, lay the most beautiful baby I had ever seen (except, of course, for my own kids and grandchildren, and about as beautiful as the other kids at whose ceremonies I had officiated…of course.) Nathan looked a tad nervous under his smile, and Elysa a little tired; their parents were kvelling, and Finn had no idea what was coming.

I’ll admit, I was a little self-conscious. After all, usually when I lead Jewish ceremonies, most of the people in the room are Jews. And when there are a lot of non-Jews, they expect me to do Jewish stuff. But very few people lead religious ceremonies from the United Lounge at Denver International Airport. From the moment I put that kippah on my head, I realized that this was going to be a little unusual. I didn’t want to stick out, to draw any unnecessary attention.

Plus, of all the events for me to do sitting there in that semi-crowded room, this one was going to be a bris! It involved…private parts. People might think it was weird, if not barbaric. A wedding or an anniversary blessing would have been so much easier.

And then, of course, there was the fear of antisemitism. There isn’t nearly as much of it these days as there used to be, but still, even now, for our people, that concern always lurks just under the surface, if not higher. I try to preach Jewish self-assurance and pride, but I have to admit that I did experience a tad of trepidation as I sat there that day.

But I couldn’t afford to let those concerns paralyze me, of course – I had a bris to do.

“Hello!” I said, “and mazel tov.”

“Thank you, Rabbi,” said someone from the other end. “We’re so glad you’re here.”

I waited for the doctor to give me the nod, and I began the ceremony. “Welcome, everyone, to one of the most time-honored and sacred rituals in Jewish life.” I found it difficult, because, on the one hand, I had to speak loudly enough for the group on the other side of the screen to hear me, but on the other, I didn’t want to be so loud as to bother the people around me or make a scene. After all, Jim, Hank, Vern, and all the others in the lounge that day were working on their own computers and had their own stuff to do.

I leaned in toward my screen, trying to turn my personal volume dial up to that sweet spot right between audible and obnoxious. “Today, we’re going to welcome this beautiful baby boy into Jewish life, and everyone except one of us is going to celebrate the event.” I didn’t look around for confirmation, but it seemed to me that I had hit the sweet spot on my volume dial. Finn and his family could hear me, and none of my neighbors in the airport lounge seemed to be complaining. I continued with the ceremony. I told a story about how our children are the guarantors of the Jewish future. I said, “Zachar l’olam brito…God remembers the covenant forever, the word commanded to a thousand generations….” I nodded back to the mohel through the screen, and he performed the circumcision as I tried to send comforting vibes to Elysa and Nathan over through the airport WiFi. After the procedure, I said, “Let this child be known among the people Israel by the name, Aharon ben Esther v’Natan.” I said a Mi Shebeirach, praying for his wellbeing and his mother’s healing, I called on Nathan and Elysa, who explained that Aharon was the name of Finn’s great-grandfather – a kind and generous man whose good qualities they prayed would be perpetuated by their son who now bore his name.

We said Kiddush, I recited the priestly benediction, and then led the whole family in a rousing chorus of Siman tov umazal tov, umazal tov usiman tov…. “What an honor it was to participate with you today,” I said. “Thank you, and mazal tov again. Goodbye…goodbye.” I waved into my screen, and they all smiled and waved back.

I sighed a breath of satisfaction, closed the screen of my laptop, and sat back in my seat. Phew!

Then, I looked around, and saw three large pairs of eyes staring at me from just as many sides. It was Jim, Hank, and Vern. They didn’t say anything at first, they just stared at me. And for a moment, I stared at them.

Then, almost in unison, the three of them said, “That was beautiful!”

“I’ve never seen anything so moving,” Jim said.

“It brought tears to my eyes,” said Hank.

“Are you a rabbi?” asked Vernon. “I didn’t know they still did ceremonies like that!”

I smiled, nodded my head, and responded, “I hope I wasn’t too loud.”

“No!” they all told me. “We loved it!”

We chatted for a few minutes after that. They each had a couple questions about being Jewish; they told me about some Jewish friends they had in high school; we shook hands; and then we each went back to our own screens and phones.

That was a great day for a lot of reasons. Not only did I get to participate in a wonderful simchah, but I also learned an important lesson from my friends Jim, Hank, and Vern. In this age of conformity, we often find ourselves afraid of sticking out, of being different. And that day I’m sure there might have been people who would have looked askance at what I was doing, thinking it cruel, unusual, or worthy of a scene from Seinfeld, that really wasn’t my experience in the airport. Others might have seen the kippah on my head and broken into antisemitic epithets, but that’s not what happened, either.

In fact, come to think of it, in my experience, I’ve met far more Verns, Hanks, and Jims out there than the other kind of people – far more people who are fascinated and appreciative of my uniqueness and quirkiness – of our uniqueness and quirkiness – than down on it. It wasn’t anything in particular that I did that drew them in, I don’t think, I was just being who I was – proudly and unapologetically, if admittedly with a little bit of trepidation.

Let’s face it. There is a lot of conformity out there, especially at places like airports. Like huge flocks of sheep, people stream from check-in to gate, or gate to baggage-claim, stopping along the way to eat and gaze into their screens. Modern life in general has a homogenizing effect, drawing us like all the other moths around us to the glittering light of the newest gadget or the shiniest car, or our daily destinations.

But that day, with a cup of wine next to my computer, and an ancient-style skullcap on my head, and in words few if anyone else in that room understood, the people around me saw me step out of the current moment and into eternity, in a way they knew my people had done for many centuries, albeit this time through Zoom. They responded, I think, to me being me, regardless of contemporary pressure to be someone else. They appreciated the connection I had with my people and my past, and they found the ritual to be mystifying and enchanting.

When the great Chasidic teacher, Reb Zusya, was on his deathbed, his students came and found him sobbing uncontrollably. They tried to comfort him, saying, “Rabbi, you have no need to fear. You’re as wise as Moses, and as kind as Abraham. Surely, Heaven will judge you positively for that.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Zusya replied. “When I arrive in heaven, I won’t be asked ‘Why weren’t you more like Moses, or why weren’t you more like Abraham.’ Instead, I’ll be asked, ‘Zusya, why weren’t you more like Zusya.’”

“Zusya, why weren’t you more like Zusya.” My friends, this is one of the key questions of our days, just like it was back then. God, you see, doesn’t make many mistakes. God created you the way you are for a reason. Those aspects of you that you’re proud of – at least in part, they are God-given gifts. And those dimensions of you that you are ashamed of, those parts of you that you’d like to hide, maybe they are failings you need to overcome, but they can make you even stronger and better in the long run. Or maybe they’re not failings at all, but just strengths and gifts in disguise. Regardless, God made you the way you are because God needs you to be that way. And when you try to quash your uniqueness, you obscure one of the universe’s most magnificent creations.

So, as we enter this new year, my friends, my message to you is simple. Be yourself. Proudly. Unapologetically. Always try to improve yourself, but in terms of your uniqueness, in terms of your quirkiness, in terms of those things that make you unlike the crowd – be yourself. Be yourself if it’s weird, be yourself if it draws stares, be yourself even if it makes you uncomfortable. It’s important, because the alternative is for you to try being someone else, and you can’t do that very well. It’s important, because, writ large, the alternative is for everyone to try being like everyone else, and if we were all like one another, that would make for a very boring world, and I think that God meant for this world to be exciting. Why would God have bothered creating a boring world? Why would God have bothered creating an undesirable you?

As for me, the next time I’m stuck in the Denver airport, I’m not going to even hesitate to lead a bris over Zoom, assuming that there’s a willing family and a ready foreskin on the other end. Because this heritage of mine, it’s something I’m proud of. It makes me stick out, and that’s a good thing. And I can’t help but think that being me – the proud Jew that I am – is something God would have wanted me to do in the open.

And if each of us can do this, then I have a feeling it will a better, richer, more vibrant world for us all.

Shanah Tovah