High Holiday 2019 Sermons

Yom Kippur Kol Nidre 2019

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein

The Power of Friendship

Two friends were walking on the beach. During some point of the walk they
had an argument, and one friend slapped the other one in the face. The
one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything, wrote in the
sand: TODAY MY BEST FRIEND SLAPPED ME IN THE FACE.

They kept on walking until they decided to take a swim. The one who had
been slapped went too far into the waves, but the other friend ran in and
pulled her out. After she recovered, she wrote on a stone: TODAY MY
BEST FRIEND SAVED MY LIFE.

The friend who had both slapped and saved her friend noticed, “After I
slapped you, you wrote in the sand. But now that I’ve saved you, you wrote
on a stone.” The other friend replied, “When a friend hurts us we should
write it down in sand where the winds of forgiveness erase it. But, when a
friend does something good for us, we should engrave it in stone so
nothing can ever erase it.”

A true story:

I had a very dear friend, a best friend in fact, from my childhood, who still
lives in New York in my old ‘hood. We were inseparable from the age of 11
until into our 30’s. My mom was like her mom and her mom was like my
mom, and in the days before Facebook and FaceTime we called each other
on the phone and spoke for hours; we took trains and planes to visit each
other in university, we gave the toast at each other’s weddings.

And then, I did something stupid. It doesn’t matter exactly what. I’m just
telling you it was one of those stupid things that you can’t get out of easily
without a lot of broken pride. I started raising kids and so did she and time
passed and the friendship dissolved—till this past summer.

I don’t know exactly why, I started to miss her a lot. I started to understand
that old adage “make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the
other gold.”

I started to see how our history of shared experience had shaped me. I
started to feel that those who knew me in my youth, and knew my family
now gone, really knew the deepest part of me.

I reached out to her, and asked if the winds of forgiveness could erase what
I had done. I asked if she could remember the important times etched in
stone. I asked if I could come see her. And she, in what I consider to be an
act of incredible grace, said yes. I flew to NY, and we reconciled.

I call her a lot now, trying to catching up on 30 years of lost friendship time.

In that moment of reconciliation I experienced what the great Jewish thinker
Rav Kook calls “sudden teshuva”: an understanding of the self and the
teshuva one needs to do, so sudden and so immediate and so clear that
there is simply no possibility of not doing it. Sudden teshuva is painful and
real and raw and urgent. I saw that friendship—not the superficial
friendship of Facebook and sappy cell-phone company TV ads but true,
deep, spiritual friendship— can be a catalyst for that kind of teshuva.

We always think of the family as central in Judaism, and it is. But I want
you to know that it is not the only foundation of a solid Jewish life.
Synagogue, school, and friends are an equal part of the equation. And we
should be treating them as if they really are.

In the first High Holiday sermon I ever gave, right out of Rabbinical school
in 1983, in front of 3,000 people at Holy Blossom, I questioned the “perfect”
and “average” family of Jewish mom, Jewish dad, 2.2 kids in day school,
and a dog— and now 36 years later, I find myself still critiquing the same
model being touted by many of our Toronto Jewish institutions.

I look around my community and yes—I see some of those mom, dad, kids
and a dog kind of families. I see those with a bevy of cousins down the
block, and in-laws in Thornhill with whom they do Shabbos every other
week. But I also see many diverse and Jewishly committed families that
look nothing like the stereotypical one— interfaith families, same-sex
families, single-parent families, blended families; Jews by choice who do
not have an extended Jewish family or a lifetime of Jewish familial
memories; single people and couples without kids and couples whose kids
live far away and families whose kids don’t come anymore with them for the
holidays; people with broken families and breaking down families and
families in crisis. People who have lost their lifetime partner, their child,
their sibling; people whose last parent just died or is dying and they are or
will soon be orphans… people redefining all the time what it means to be a
family or to have a family; people who want deep relationships that matter.
So tonight, on the holiest night of the year, I want to make the case for the
lost Jewish virtue of friendship.

The concept of friendship itself is not new, it’s as old as the Bible and the
story of Jonathan and David, it’s celebrated in classic Greek literature and
medieval poetry. Of course there are many kinds of friends and always
have been—casual friends, co-worker friends, former class-mate friends,
neighbour friends, friends of a friend… Sometimes our friendships come
and go like ships in the night and sometimes we drop anchor and stay put
for years. Sometimes we actually “divorce” a friend who is not truly loving
us, and sometimes we make a furiously fast new friendship which feels like
we’ve known each other for decades. Sometimes we reconnect with
someone we haven’t seen in years and it’s as if we just saw each other
yesterday; and sometimes there is a real awkwardness as we try and
reconstruct what it was that brought us together in the first place.

For those who have children, think about the friendships of the busy years
of building a family. Our friends are often the parents of our kids friends,
making our kids the reason and the centre of our friendships. Nothing
wrong with that, but once your kids grow and become adults with friends of
their own, you may find that these friendships fizzle out. Take heed as the
Rabbis teach in Pirke Avot 5:16: “Any love that is dependent upon a
specific cause, when the cause is gone, the love is gone; but if it does not
depend on a specific cause, it will never cease.”

For those without children, or a spouse, it is time for the Jewish community
to use the word ”family” for you, going broader than the narrow postindustrial
definition of the nuclear family. The “family” of our Israelite
ancestors was a huge tribe and I think they would be shocked to see how
small that idea has become. How beautiful it would be—mah tovu ohalecha
Yaakov— if all of us could open wider the tent flaps of what constitutes
“family”.

I believe the spiritual depth and potential of real friendship is being
bastardized by the amassing of Facebook “friends” and “friendversaries”
and the yearly album created by an algorithm that cultivates your memories
for you. Always a follower, never a friend.

In fact, there was a July 2019 poll from YouGov, a polling firm and market
research company, which was reported widely in newspapers, social media
and psychological journals. It found that 30 percent of millennials say they
feel lonely. This is the highest percentage of all generations surveyed.
Furthermore, 27 percent said they had “no close friends,” and a shocking
22 percent said they had zero friends at all. If this generation is truly
lonelier, that should really concern us and them because research shows
that loneliness tends to increase—not decrease— as we get older.

We know that friendships are good for our physical health. Psychology
professor William Chopik of Michigan State University did two separate
surveys in 2016. Through his research with over 200,000 subjects he found
that our quality of friendship influences our overall health, and that
friendships “became a stronger predictor of health and happiness” as
people get older.

He quotes the 2016 National Academy of Sciences study completed by
Claire Yang, sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who
found that people with close social ties had lower blood pressure, lower
body mass index, and lower levels of the inflammation marker C-reactive
protein.

Friendships should also be good for our spiritual health. Friendships which
are more than the ability to walk into someone’s house and have your
device automatically recognize their wifi. I’m inspired in this by the thinking
of Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, a modern Orthodox Rabbi who founded Valley
Beit Midrash in Phoenix where I was honoured to teach last winter. He
writes: “When friendship is about the cultivation of virtue, the opportunity to
pursue the good, the exploration of life, and the search for meaning it is
transformative and enduring. Friendships of pleasure and utility are fun but
end as our needs and wants evolve. Friendships of virtue…are attached to
our pursuit of the just, holy, and good…To become virtuous citizens
committed to moral and religious excellence, (friends) are crucial.”

I want to suggest that the spiritual depth of friendship is in it being a joint
effort in the pursuit of holiness. When friendship is about having a good
time on a hike or at a movie, it is fine, it’s fulfilling, and it’s fun. I want us to
think about about impactful and enduring friendships which help us in the
pursuit of teshuva, which help us foster the best in ourselves and which
demand of us that we live up to our moral responsibilities and own up to
our failings.

And dare I say that the best place to meet such friends is at places which
value and encourage the pursuit of holiness—like a shul. Raise your hand if
as a result of being at City Shul you have made at least one new friend?

I know that your spouse is supposed to be your best friend, and in the best
marriages that is true. We develop a kind of “ezer k’negdo” relationship as
the first couple, Adam and Eve, were supposed to have—ezer, a helper
and k’negdo- a critic. A good spouse makes you want to be better than you
ever thought you’d want to be.

Even if we are blessed to have that kind of spouse, though, there is a
certain un-invested distance that friends get which spouses do not. After all,
you don’t have to sleep all night next to the friend who has just challenged
you to do better. What’s more, although you don’t have a choice of who
your family of origin is, and the hard truth is you don’t have control over
who your kids have family with, you do have a choice of who your friends
are, and how you are as a friend.

I think of it this way: a real friend is someone I’d want to say Kaddish for.
While Judaism is masterful in the way it guides us on mourning for the loss
of a relative, our tradition is silent regarding the loss of friends. Traditionally,
we do not say Kaddish or yizkor for friends. With our parents, spouse,
sibling, or child, we have clear rituals to give voice to our shock and grief.
But not for our friends. I want us to think about cultivating the kind of friends
that are so important in our lives that tomorrow, we would go to yizkor for
them.

In Masechet Berakhot in the Talmud, we read the story of Rabbi Eleazar
who was suffering from deep despair. When his friend, Rabbi Yochanan,
visits him, he finds Eleazar alone in a darkened room, facing the wall.
He cannot bear to see the light; even the light from Yochanan's arm is too
bright for him. When Yochanan sees his friend crying he asks, "Why are
you crying?" Eleazar answers, "I weep because all light fades into
darkness, because all beauty eventually rots." Yochanan, sitting beside his
friend, does not try and cheer him up, does not make light and does not
offer fixes to his problems; instead he replies, "Yes, ultimately everything
does die. So perhaps you have reason to weep." Then Yochanan sat down
with his friend and wept alongside him. After a while Yochanan asked,
"Does darkness comfort you? Do you want this suffering?" "No," Elazar
says. "Then give me your hand," replies Yochanan, and he lifts Rabbi
Eleazar up from his bed and out of his darkened room. Sometimes it is only
a friend who can lift us from deepest darkness.

Three friends were once stranded on a desert island. They find a magic
lantern containing a genie, who grants them each one wish.
The first friend wishes he was off the island and back home.
The second friend wishes the same.
The third friend says "I'm lonely. I wish my friends were back here.”
Sometimes it is only a friend who can get you off that island—and then
back again on.

That is why Pirke Avot 1:6 commands us
עֲשֵׂה לְ רַב, וּקְנֵה לְ חָבֵר
“Get for yourself a teacher, and acquire for yourself a friend…

Rabbenu Yonah, a 13th century Spanish commentator on that phrase
teaches: "A person needs three things from a good friend. One is words of
Torah… And the second is help with mitzvot…And the third is good
advice…:”

This is what Yanklowitz calls the virtue of friendship—people who are able
to teach us, inspire us, and advise us.

Midrash Avot d'Rabbi Natan on this section asks: "How does one acquire a
friend? …by eating and drinking together, by studying Torah and debating
together…by sharing private thoughts—thoughts regarding Torah and life.
And when they debate matters of Torah and importance, the bonds of
friendship and truth will be strengthened.”

Debate with friends? Most of us have friends who are like us, politically,
socio-economically, chronologically. If we are partnered they are generally
partnered, and if we have kids, they generally have kids and we talk about
our kids or agree not to talk about our kids and then the conversation gets
into why we don’t want to talk about our kids…

Do we have friendships unafraid to cross socio-economic, racial, gender,
age, family status and political lines? Friendships which engage in deep
conversations, not only in superficialities? In Berachot 31a we learn: “One
should not part from one’s friend without exchanging words of Torah.” The
word for friendship in Aramaic —chevruta—is the exact same word for a
study partner.

Friendships which are spiritual anchors are with people who can be our
learning partners—not only because they support us but also because they
challenges us. Friends who we choose not simply by who we are, but by
who we would like to become.

Friendships which are spiritual anchors go the distance. The Talmud
records that when Job's friends heard of the tragedies that befell him, they
traveled a distance of 700 miles. In those days, a trip of that length
probably took about two weeks – each way. That means his friends took off
over a month of their time to console him. I’ll never forget when my mom
died that my friend Adrienne drove—drove—from Guatemala back to
Toronto, a record 5,000 kilometers in 4.5 days, so she could be at the last
day of shiva. I’ve been at shivas for people from this shul where friends
have been there every single day.

Friendships which are spiritual anchors are valued in the way we speak
about them. Many of us have friends who we say are “like family.” “I love
her like a sister," and "He's the brother I never had”. I was once talking to a
dear friend and she said, “I think we need a family word to call our
relationship. Why don’t we call each other sisters-in-love?” and so we do. In
my family, I have three sisters-in-love.

During the summer, as my friend and I started the healing process, I had
this thought about the stories we read on Rosh Hashana of Abraham and
Sarah and Hagar. I wondered what would these narratives of faith would
have looked like if there had been friendships. If Sarah and Hagar had
become friends. If they had talked it out and come up with a plan
themselves. If Abraham had a friend he could have called before taking
Isaac up the mountain, a buddy that he could ask, “hey, I heard his crazy
voice last night telling me to sacrifice Isaac— what do you think I should
do?” And, what if Sarah had had a friend she could have called? “My headin-
the-sky husband took Isaac today to who knows where and I have no
idea if they are ever coming home!” What if she had had a friend to talk
through the night while she waited for them to come home? Maybe she
would not have died in the next parsha, as the Midrash says, of a broken
heart.

The lack of friendship makes these lonely narratives. There is a beautiful
story in the Talmud in Taanit 23b of Honi Hama’agal, the Jewish Rip van
Winkle. Honi sat down to have a meal and sleep overcame him. As he lay
down, a rocky formation enclosed him which hid him from sight and he
slept for seventy years. When he awoke he saw a old man gathering the
fruit of the carob tree and Honi asked him, "Are you the man who planted
that tree?" The man replied: “No, I am his grandson." Honi exclaimed: "It is
clear that I have slept for seventy years." He returned home, shaken. There
he inquired, "Is the son of Honi still alive?" The people answered him, “Not
his son, but his grandson is still living." He said to them: "I am Honi, Honi
Hama’agal,” and no one would believe him.

He ran to the study hall and there he overheard the scholars say, "The law
is as clear to us as in the days of Honi” and he called out excitedly, “But I
am Honi!" But the scholars did not believe him either. Not having a friend
or family left, he died of sorrow. Raba said: "Hence the saying, 'Either
companionship or death. O chevruta/o mituta.”

This year, can we connect more deeply to just one friend? Is there
someone you miss that you don’t keep up with enough? Is there one friend
you haven’t told in a while just how much they mean to you?

When the Torah commands us in Leviticus 19 to “Love your neighbour as
thyself”. ואהבת לרעך כמוך —the word in Hebrew translated as “neighbour” is
actually רֵעַ , more accurately “friend.” Love your friend the way you love
yourself. The Slonimer Rebbe in his commentary to that verse teaches: the
High Holidays are called Yom Truah, the day of the shofar blast. The word
truah—blast—is from same root as the word re-ah—friend. The blast of the
shofar, he says, is a call to re-ut, to the spirituality of friendship.

This year, can we be better friends even when we are busy, can we just
send a text “thinking of you, good luck on your (whatever)…or how’s that
mtg/interview/situation going?” Can we bring dinner over when a friend is
sick? Can we drive over, drop in, skype when they are having a bad day?

This year can we add the friends we once deeply loved who are now gone
to our personal family yartzeit lists?

And if you come to City Shul on a somewhat regular basis— this year, can
you invite one new friend from shul to Shabbat dinner, for a Saturday night,
for a holiday meal at your home, to deepen that friendship outside of shul?

In Exodus 33:11, Moses speaks to G-d face to face. Then the Torah adds a
remarkable phrase: כַּאֲשֶׁ֛ר יְדַבֵּ֥ר אִ֖ישׁ אֶל־רֵעֵ֑הוּ
“The way a person speaks with a friend.” Would that we saw God in the
face of our friends, and see our friends as the face of God.

Shana Tova.

Yom Kippur morning 2019

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein

All Religion is Politics

An older couple had a son, who was still living with them. The parents were
a little worried, as the son was still undecided about his future career. So
they decided to do a small test. They put a ten-dollar bill, a Bible, and a
bottle of whiskey on the kitchen table. Then they hid.

The man told his wife, “If our son takes the money, he will be a
businessman, if he takes the Bible, he will be a pastor, and if he takes the
bottle of whiskey, he’ll be up to no good.”

The parents hid behind a door, and peeping around it they saw their son
take the ten-dollar bill and slide it in his pocket. Then, he took the Bible,
and put it under his arm without looking at it. Finally, he took the bottle,
opened it, and took a drink. Then he left, carrying all three items.

The wife cried out: “Oh no! This is much worse than we could ever have
imagined! “Why?” Said her husband. “Because” she said, “Our son is
clearly going to be a politician!”

I generally hesitate to talk about politics on this holiest day. As they say, the
word politics is made up of “poly”— the Latin word for “many” and “tics”
meaning “bloodsucking creatures.”

But we Rabbis are encouraged to talk politics when it comes to Israel, so
why not about Canada? Why not about the planet? Why not about what our own shul can do?

As a rabbi, my task is not only to bless, to teach texts, to listen, to officiate
at life-cycle events. It is also my job, as my homiletics professor told us
back in seminary: to comfort the afflicted— and to afflict the comfortable.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his book To Heal The World, suggests that
Judaism is a religion of sacred discontent. Abraham, Moses, Amos, Isaiah
are messengers of dissatisfaction with the status quo. He writes, “In
Judaism, faith is not acceptance but protest, against the world that is, in the
name of the world that is not yet but ought to be...Judaism is not peace of
mind…”

While City Shul does help give its members peace of mind, it should be a
place which leads the community in acts of sacred discontent.

As Elie Weisel wrote: “The mission of the Jewish people has never been to
make the world more Jewish, but to make it more human.”

So yes, this sermon is going to get political. Because today’s haftarah gets
political. Isaiah, who we just heard, castigates the Israelites for everything
from oppressing their workers to using violence. The haftarah stands in
contrast to the Torah reading, which is focused almost entirely on the ritual
behaviour of priests in the Temple. The haftarah demands that rituals and
morals not be two separate ways of being Jewish.

This morning’s haftarah begins with "No! This is the fast I prefer: unlock the
chains of wickedness, untie the knots of servitude. Let the oppressed go
free…” Isaiah is an outraged activist wagging his finger at fasting
hypocrites who underpay their workers. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, one of this
generation’s greatest activist Rabbis writes: "I think the speech was actually
given as an interruption of a Yom Kippur service… I fantasize Isaiah
elbowing his way… thru the crowd at a Super-Synagogue in Babylonia —
and interrupting — shouting out this radical challenge to the
liturgy….Unfortunately, the result of the Rabbis' assigning this to be read on YK is that it becomes not a challenge to the liturgy but a part of it. There is a wonderful story by Franz Kafka: "One day a leopard stalked into the
synagogue, roaring and lashing his tail. Three weeks later, he had become
part of the liturgy.”

Maybe because I’m still a New Yorker at heart I want to shout out too, I
want to interrupt the praying and the singing and even the beautiful Avinu
Malkenu and say listen!— ki ain banu ma’asim— we don’t have enough
deeds to truly merit compassion from G-d until we are figure out how to
practice compassion to others and to our planet.

We need ma’asim this year, City Shul. Ki Ain Banu…we do not have
enough deeds.

In 2015 I preached a sermon on Yom Kippur morning on the immediate and urgent need for us to adopt a Syrian refugee family. We did it. We raised an extraordinary amount of money and yes though we are still waiting we will have our refugee family and we will mobilize and we will settle them. That was 2015. It’s 2019 and I am asking you to make two solid, immediate and urgent commitments.

The first is to respond more clearly as a Jewish community to the climate
crisis. Rabbi Joshua Hammerman writes:” Paradise is burning. Notre Dame
is burning. The church and the mosque and the synagogue are being set
aflame. Moriah is burning. The Amazon is burning. The world is burning.
The bush is burning —and we are being consumed.”

The scientific consensus that we face serious climate challenge is
overwhelming, and our Jewish responsibility for the earth goes back to our
very origins as a people. Our biblical tradition is rooted in our people’s
connection with the earth. We were shepherds and farmers and the Torah
was actually about what it meant to have a functional and not a failed
relationship with the earth.

I am wondering what Isaiah would have said today about the climate crisis.
I think he might have said this:

(Sing to haftarah trope): “My message is that we'll be watching you….You
have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet
I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire
ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction,
and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic
growth. How dare you!”

Greta Thunberg would not be afraid to meet Isaiah. As a Rabbi, I don’t want
to be afraid to meet Isaiah either when he asks me, “what did you talk
about on Yom Kippur while the world was getting hotter and hotter in your
own lifetime?”

Trust me, I am not trying to fear-monger or be hyperbolic. But if we do not
start doing something obvious, and marked, and clear, we at City Shul will
be part of the problem and not part of the solution; and we will have to
answer for this to Isaiah.

Bob Horenstein, director of community relations and public affairs at the
Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, wrote in the Jerusalem Post. “It
baffles me that many Jews — and Jewish organizations — still don’t
consider climate change to be a ‘Jewish issue’ … as long as Jews live on
this planet, combatting global warming will be a Jewish responsibility.”

43 Israeli Orthodox rabbis recently signed a rabbinic climate change
statement urging the Israeli government to shift from its widespread use of
fossil fuels to a far greater emphasis on renewable sources of energy like
solar and wind, and urging the Knesset to prioritize legislation that reduces
greenhouse gas emissions.

Pope Francis has what is being called by the Religion News Service a “new
theology of climate change.”

Hazon, the international Jewish environmental organization, has sponsored
four billboards in Times Square this summer to declare 5780, “The Year of
Environmental Teshuva.”

So what are we going to do at City Shul?

I am working with a group called Faith in the City to prioritize climate
change as the number one interfaith action item on our agenda. We
marched as a shul at Sept 27’s global climate strike but there were only a
handful of us.

So there is a sign up sheet outside for every one of the following action
plans.

1. We need people to take on meeting with our city councillor and with the
city recycling people responsible for this building. We need clear guidance
as to what we can use that is really recyclable and how and what we can
recycle. Hundreds of paper plates and plastic cutlery and cups are being
thrown from this shul into the landfill. Simcha after simcha, Shabbos after
Shabbos and we need to know exactly what we can do to stop it.
2. We need people to join a kiddush greening task force. This group will not
discuss the menu. It will deal solely with the waste factor and seek creative
ways to green up this most important part of our weekly life at City Shul.
3. Our new Tikkun Olam chairperson Phil Rees has made climate change
action his top priority. We need you to get involved. We need people to sign up to get on that committee and to start making plans for things this entire shul can do as a leading voice in the downtown Jewish community.

Now second, Isaiah will ask me “What did you talk about when anti-
Semitism got to the boiling point in your lifetime?” I’ll tell him that though I
have never previously spoken about anti-Semitism from this bima, even on
the Shabbat after the Pittsburg shooting when we had a Solidarity Shabbat
and I spoke about that one incident as if it was unrelated, unusual, and
unprecedented— this year, I feel differently. One year after two deadly
synagogue shootings in the US, an upsurge in violent hate crimes and
presidential tweets calling the majority of American Jewish voters “very
disloyal,” we are at a crossroads. Boston writer Julie Parker notes: “As my
grandmother says, ‘I didn’t survive the Holocaust to watch Nazis march
through an American city as though they were on their way to a damn
luau.’”

Canada is not immune to the global trend of rising anti-Semitism. Online
hatred is fuelling a rise in anti-Semitism that saw a record-breaking number of Jewish Canadians harassed and assaulted in 2018. According to
Statistics Canada, Jews are still— still— the most targeted group for policer eported hate crimes in Canada. And just last Saturday—days ago— anti-
Semitic graffiti was sprayed on Beth Jacob Synagogue in Hamilton.

If you are watching what is going on around the world, you should be
horrified. Last Friday evening a man armed with a knife attempted to run
into a synagogue in central Berlin. The man was tackled by security
personnel at the entrance. Two separate vicious antisemitic incidents
involving children in Melbourne this past week were reported on Thursday.
After weeks of merciless anti-Semitic taunting of the 5 year old grandson of
Holocaust survivors, the school acknowledged the bullying, but will not treat it as an antisemitic incident. The same with the middle school where a 12 year old boy was forced, after taunting and brutal bullying, to bend down and kiss the shoes of a Muslim classmate. Because it did not happen on the school grounds but was in a nearby park— with 9 children of that
particular school present—the school administration will not classify it.

Trust me, I am also not fear-mongering or being hyperbolic on this one
either. I feel strongly that we must not allow anti-Semitism to become the
fulcrum of our Jewish lives. We must not over-react to anti-Semitism,
seeing danger at every corner, but we must react at the very least:
thoughtfully and strategically. Our ushering team and staff have taken
training through Federation. Our new home at St Andrew’s is fully
monitored and secured. We are meeting with BSU to be sure they
understand our needs in then short-term and also the long-term.

The security investment — in time, money and energy — that we in this
synagogue must make in the wake of those assaults last year and new
assaults this year is, frankly, exhausting and takes away from precious
other resources— but we ignore it at our peril. Yes— you saw increased
security at every door and yes— your bags and backpacks were checked
and yes— if we had the proper funds that didn’t also cut into everything
else we need and want to do that would continue as it is now standard
procedure at almost every other synagogue. And no— we will sadly not be
able to fully practice the “audacious hospitality” we wish we could, without
first knowing we are safe.

Rabbi Mark Katz wrote: "Showing up at…synagogue after Pittsburgh is an
act of defiance. Walking into social justice spaces as a proud Jew even if
we might be asked unfairly to answer for every action of the Israeli
government is an act of defiance. People should know that their neighbor,
their customer, their patron is Jewish. For if they do, it will bring into focus
the personal costs of ignoring anti-Semitism.”

So what are we going to do at City Shul?

We do small interfaith activities and only a small group shows up, unless its
a Ring fo Peace which is an emergency. So there is a sign up sheet outside
for every one of the following action plans.

1. We need a real Interfaith Relationships Task Force to plan interfaith
events that go beyond the bima. I will continue to invite my Christian
and Muslim clergy friends to attend and to speak here. But there needs
to be real learning, real work being done and nurtured across interfaith
lines, between City Shul and churches and City Shul and mosques one
a regular basis and not just the reactive Rings of Peace. And not just
nicey-nice interfaith where we go and do a model Seder for them or
plan some other spiritual tourism event to show others what we believe
in and practice; no— real deep learning together that fosters trust and
relationship, where we can share our pain and our fear and our hope
with allies.
2. We need someone with relationships with our Muslim friends and the
local mosques to help them see what we are going through after the
latest Muslim-Jewish altercation in Australia and the negative press and
anti-Islam PR it is being used to fuel.
3. We need to raise at least $5000— above and beyond the usual Kol
Nidre pledges which we need to keep the place running— for an
increased security presence here at BSU this one year. This one-time
expense will allow us to hire a security guard for other large events and
services during this year without diverting general funds. Please see
any LT member or email me privately to be part of that. There is also a
sign up sheet outside o this and someone will call you back right after
the holiday. Please, friend, know that while we appreciate your advice
about security, we are getting it from experts. For this one, we need
your money.

Of course, we will as Jews surely continue to reach out to other victims of
hate. Because we are not safe until all are safe.

And back to those pesky politicians. Isaiah railed against corrupted officials
who cared nothing for the poor and vulnerable. I think Isaiah would also
ask me what did I speak about just two weeks before the Canadian Federal
election, an election that could change the social and moral fabric of our
country. I’ll tell him I used my pulpit to remind people to get out and vote,
even though I know Election Day, October 21 is Shmini Atzeret—I assure
you that our service here will be over and done well before the polling
stations close. And let me remind you that alternative voting arrangements
are in place.

Friends: just as we have aspirations for ourselves as individuals, we must
have aspirations for our synagogue that go beyond beautiful singing and a
good Kiddush. Pirke Avot says Jewish life stands on three things, three
legs of a stool as it were, and we sing this: al shlosha devarim ha-olam
omed, on three things the world stands: on Torah, on prayer and on deeds
of lovingkindness. We are really good at Torah and we are really good at
prayer. We have got to make the third leg of that stool stand stronger.

There’a story about a young and very successful executive traveling down
a neighbourhood street, going a bit too fast in his sleek, black, 12 cylinder
Jaguar, which was only two months old.

As his car passed a group of kids playing, a brick sailed out and smashed
Into the Jag's shiny black side door! The executive slamsmed the brakes,
and madly spun the Jaguar back to the spot from where the brick had been
thrown. The driver jumped out of the car, grabbed the kid and shouted,
"What the heck are you doing?!" That's my new Jag, that brick you threw is
gonna cost you a lot of money. Why did you throw it?"

"I didn't know what else to do!" pleaded the youngster. "I threw the brick
because no one else would stop!" The boy pointed “That’s my brother,
mister," he said. "He fell out of his wheelchair and I can't lift him up."
Sobbing, the boy asked the driver, "Would you please help me get him
back into his wheelchair? He's hurt and he's too heavy for me."

It’s said that the driver never fixed the side door of his Jaguar. He kept the
dent to remind him not to go through life so fast that someone has to throw a brick at him to get his attention.

My friends: Bricks are being thrown at us and we have got to stop and help,
before we all really get hurt.

Pirke Avot 1:15 teaches:
אֱמֹר מְעַט וַעֲשֵׂה הַרְבֵּה
Shammai says — say little but do much.

Isaiah and I have said everything we need to say this morning. Now, we go
and do.

Shana Tova; Gmar Chatimah Tova.

Nick Gunz

In today's reading the Torah sets out the rules for Yom Kippur. Among them, Aaron the Priest takes two goats. One of these he sacrifices. Over the other, he confesses all the sins of the People Israel — seeking what Talmud Yoma 36b:11 calls 'atonement through words' — and then sends it away with another, subordinate priest.

The fate of this second goat, the one sent away, known to us as the 'scapegoat', has puzzled commentators for millennia, in part because the goat is said to be marked 'for Azazel' — ע-ז-א-ז-ל — a word which has stubbornly defied translation. Is Azazel a place? Is Azazel a wilderness in which the goat is left, literally, bewildered and unable to return home? Is it a cliff? A 'steep slope' or 'towering peak', as Rashi suggests, over which the goat is cast to its doom?

There are complex lexical and etymological arguments in favour of each of these positions. But, honestly, I want to talk about a third identification for 'Azazel'.

Because when I read about it, my first reaction was "are you fricking kidding me?" (only I didn't say "fricking", sorry [beats breast]), and then "can this possibly be real?" and then "why has nobody ever told me about this?"

Rabbi Gunther Plaut, former head rabbi at Holy Blossom Temple, an impeccably respectable authority in Reform Jewish thought, wrote in 1996:

"Azazel… was probably a demonic being, residing in the wilderness, whose abode was regarded as a focus of impurity."¹

Wait, Gunther Plaut thinks Azazel is a demon?!

Eh, not really. He's taking what you might call a 'historical' approach to the origins of the text. It isn't my favourite way of approaching Torah but, occasionally, it turns up a demon. How cool is that?

So where is this coming from?

Plaut references the scholarship of Rabbi Bernard J Bamberger who reports a fallen angel called "Azazel" showing up in various pseudoepistomoligical writings from about -300 to -100, compiled in the Book of Enoch.² But there are a lot of demons with similar names in that text, and the Azazel of Enoch doesn't seem to be explicitly linked to the goat thing. Skip forward nine hundred (ish) years: the 8th century midrashic compilation Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer,³ identifies the Azazel in the Torah with an angel called "Sammeal". The Ramban (Nachmanides) picks upon on this text in the 13th century, as does his rough contemporary Hezekiah ben Manoah (called Chizkuni), describing the Azazel/Sammeal thing as an esoteric double meaning of the text. They ascribe, to the angel Sammeal, some demon-like qualities. But Ramban is very clear that Sammeal is an angel: he calls him a "celestial minister" and "servant" of G'd. I don't think that sounds like a demon.

Ok, full disclosure, a lot of smart people disagree with me on this. Rabbi Joseph Hertz, for one (Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth during the First and Second World Wars): he writes that Nachmanides thinks Azazel is a demon. As, by the way, does our own beloved rabbi.

But I've been through the texts, and I just can't see it. I disagree. Point is, I don't think (Hi Rabbi Goldstein!) I don't think that any of these people believed that Azazel, in the Torah, is a demon. But they all think that somebody else believed that. 

…which is how demons work, isn't it? I don't believe in demons. I think this story is kind of funny because I don't believe in demons. If I did, it wouldn't be funny; it would be scary. You don't, we don't believe in demons, because we're modern, sophisticated people. No, you and I don't believe in demons. It's those misguided other people who believe in demons.

People in the past believed in demons. And that's understandable, because they lived in a demon-haunted world. For our ancestors, the dark of night was impenetrable, the creatures that inhabited it mysterious, the noises that emanated from it strange and frightening. When people died, it was often for no apparent reason. Or else an untreatable ailment could linger, for years of inexplicable, irredeemable pain. They used demons to express their fear and disgust, to have a locus for their anger and incomprehension. Theirs was a demon-haunted world and, to live in it, they needed demons.

But, of course, you and I don't believe in demons, do we? We're sophisticated, modern people. We can shine lights into the darkness; we can see the animals of the night as they are and not as we fear them to be.

We don't believe in demons, do we? I mean we don't, right?

Of course not! No, we fix our fear on rational, material things from the everyday world. You know, like homeless people, immigrants, Antifa anarchists, Muslims, the mentally ill. You know, modern fears, for modern people.

Of course, we don't look too closely at these people. That would be silly: the whole reason you demonise somebody is so you can avoid having to get close to them. They're demons! They're probably gross! Probably.

You know, we should probably know better. Because, let's not kid around, people demonise us. They've been doing it for centuries, and recently it's on an upswing.

I've spent more time than I care to on the internet, watching people radicalise (mostly) young men to hate me. They're very good at it. They give their recruits personal attention; they nurture their fear and resentment like saplings. They build, for them, a solid scaffold of selective truths and plausible lies. There are now tens, probably hundreds of thousands of far-right sympathisers in Canada. And the most dangerous ones aren't even the ones who pop off and murder people. The most dangerous ones are the ones who wear suits, and uniforms, and are diligently playing a very, very long game to work their way into places where they have power. And can wield it.

It's a big problem. We have to fix it. We have a duty to fix it. But here's an even bigger problem:

We won't be able to fix this until we recognise that when they demonise us, we demonise them back.

Because we don't want to think about them; who would? We don't want to remember that they're people, that their hatred is fuelled by anger and pain. We demonise them, because they are legitimately scary. And when you demonise someone you don't have to look into the details of their lives, treat them like human beings, take a part in their redemption. Demonisation is a really useful way to shut the doors of compassion on the people who make you afraid. I have spoken to so many people who would rather shut that door than actually survive. So many people who would rather close their eyes and wait for the blow to fall, not because they are cowards, not because they are fools, but because the alternative involves admitting that their enemies are people, and that is simply too painful.

We can shut every door we like. We can post a guard, turn this place into a fortress. But the enemy haunting our gates is not a cadre of evil, demonic people. The real enemy is ignorance. It is the dark of night, that makes demons, the randomness of pain, the unfathomable aetiology of misery and failure. The real enemy is incoherence.

Let's go back to the Torah. Azazel, alleged demon, is situated In the Desert, בּמִַּדְבָּרֽ , just like the Israelites themselves. That desert is described as an ארֶֶץ גּזְרֵָה , a 'land (eretz) of g'zerah'. Now, together those words are usually translated as 'wilderness'. But on its own, גּזְרֵָה is a word used to describe
something that sits outside of human rationality and comprehension. Azazel sits in a land of human meaninglessness, a Wasteland, in the T.S. Elliot sense of the word.

We have to go there. If we want to diffuse the white supremacists, we have to go to the Wasteland they inhabit. In fact, we can't afford not to. We have to go there, towing our happy little goat. And carrying our Torah.

Our tradition is one that survives. We are uniquely equipped to go into the wilderness, because our many centuries have given us the tools we need.

1. "Go and Learn" - A monster that feeds on lies starves in a field of knowledge. Go and learn! And don't be afraid to teach. Because, face it, if we aren't willing to teach with patience and tolerance and joy then, believe me, the nazis are more than willing to pick up the slack.

2. "Welcome the stranger" - That's another tool. The basic premise of the murderous far right is that different groups of people cannot live together. Prove them wrong. The one thing they can't explain away are people from different cultures celebrating together with honour and love. Come out for interfaith events. Build up your own community. Hate flees from love like darkness from a lamp.

Ah yes, the lamp. Take a look on the Ark where we keep our scrolls: the Ner Tamid, the eternal light. It is, perhaps, our greatest tool.

We all have our demons, each of us and all of us together. We all have the gift of the gathering light to show us that we can solve our problems together, bear our sorrows together, that we don't have to be lonely and afraid and powerless in the gathering dark.

2800 years ago, the Prophet Isaiah asked us, in our Covenant, to be an אור לגויים , a light unto the nations. That ancient call is our chance. It's the best one we have. It's the last one we might get.

Demons are only demons when they live in darkness and desolation. We have the chance be the אור לגויים , to turn our demons into people.

Gmar Chatimah Tova

1 Plaut, 780.
2 Book of Enoch, 54:5, &c.
3 46:8-9