Note: this sermon was delivered on Erev Yom Kippur 5785, October 11, 2024, by JRC Rabbi Rachel Weiss. The full transcript is below.
Psalm 92: the Psalm for Shabbat opens: Tov lehodot l’adonai. It is good to give thanks. Tonight is both Shabbat and Yom Kippur, and while Yom Kippur is already referred to as “shabbat shabbaton” -the Shabbat of all sabbaths- this year we have a double blessing.
Tov lehodot l’adonai. In this refrain we sing each Friday evening and Saturday morning, as we did an hour ago, we share our gratitude aloud. For the size of the good need not parallel the weight of the despair in order for us to feel its impact, and the more we name our blessings, the more aware we are of the good around us. When we freely share with each other what we are grateful for, we open a window into each others’ lives and experiences.
Tonight, I am grateful for you.
I am so proud of JRC. I am proud to be your rabbi and I am proud of our community. In this moment, for a congregation with a traumatic history around Israel/Palestine to have held space for the breadth of opinion, belief, wrestling, questioning, and curiosity in a landscape that often reduces to binaries and absolutes is remarkable. It is not simple. It is not painless; in fact, it’s often quite the opposite. But I am most proud that our commitment to community, to staying together and expanding our tent, and to being Jewish together has meant that we are willing to stay through the discomfort and pain.
But beyond the realm of Israel/Palestine in our community, I am proud and grateful for all of you.
We are a place of nuance and complexity. We are engaging. We are a source of comfort to many. We are a place that writes statements that none of us might write individually, but that we come to agree upon -enough- collectively. We are a place that prioritizes mental health and spiritual wellbeing, which includes the full health and wellbeing of your rabbi and cantor. You care about us and have stepped in, time and time again, to share and hold the weight, for you see us as humans too. You give us grace when we miss the mark, and we have sometimes. Let me tell you, this is a rare relationship. And we as a congregation are growing. This is not because of me. This is because of us. And I am very grateful to be here with you.
Tov lehodot indeed.
I am also grateful for my mentors and teachers who came before me, on whose shoulders I stand. Nearly 20 years ago I was a rabbinical student hired as a Cooperberg-Rittmaster Rabbinical Intern at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York City, the world’s largest LGBTQ synagogue; I did not know that the influence, rabbinic mentorship, and profound learning that shaped me there would travel with me to JRC today. For a decade I was intern and then associate rabbi alongside Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, who retired this June after 32 years of leadership at CBST. Rabbi Kleinbaum pushed me to find what I didn’t realize I knew and speak it aloud, to hone my own voice to preach, who inspired me to watch and learn, who helped me gut-check and take risks and explore what I could do with my own rabbinate, whose many innovations in synagogue community are now part of what we do here at JRC. Like all good teachers, her fingerprints are everywhere. I am profoundly grateful for her.
My family returned to New York this summer to attend her final Shabbat service, over a thousand in attendance, for which the congregation commissioned a song in her honor; the lyrics are composed of her greatest sermon lines. One line we sang over and over, and I carry with me as I do Rabbi Kleinbaum’s mentorship:
Joy is an act of political and spiritual resistance.
Yes, Joy.
Last week I spoke about antisemitism and relationships, and asked us to think about how we show up with our Judaism in the world. Your response was and is deeply moving. Thank you.
The reality of antisemitism necessitates us to lean into our relationships and push us to open, not close our circles, even when it feels scary. To show up with Judaism on the outside.
Tonight, I want to challenge us to think about how we show up to our Judaism on the inside.
There is no good word for the opposite of antisemitism, at least not one that we would use in a Jewish-positive context. But how might we describe our feeling of being proud, of being spiritually replenished and filled because our Judaism is a source of nourishment? What words capture the feeling when we leave a meaningful life cycle ritual and know that we are connected to people who have carried on our traditions for millenia? What’s the word for fully-formed Jewish summer camp songs that pour out of nowhere and suddenly we feel part of the same tribe? What counterbalances the shame of antisemitism?
It’s Jewish Joy.
Synonyms for joy might be happiness, pleasure, fun, triumph, or satisfaction, but these words are too small. Joy is a profound abiding connection, limitless and transformative. Joy is a well, a reservoir that nourishes and sustains.
Jennifer Senior, author of the NYT parenting bestseller All Joy and No Fun, defines joy as “the happiness that’s remembered and thought about, the happiness that makes up the life story.” How might we cultivate these Jewish experiences that are remembered, thought about, and make up our Jewish life story?
Like many of you, I have spent this year associating Jewish experiences with grief. It’s too painful to do anything Jewish right now; some are saying, so I just won’t, and absenting themselves from Judaism entirely. This grief is legitimate and present, and we have to feel it and help hold it for each other. But it cannot be a permanent state. It cannot be the defining characteristic of our Judaism.
The tragedy of this moment, I fear, may be our own stuckness, for a Judaism that is rooted in tragedy and trauma may not survive, because despair about the state of the Jewish people is not a strategy. Journalist Dahlia Lithwick wrote on July 31st in response to the feeling that surged as Vice President Harris stepped into presidential candidacy: “Widespread public despair is a hallmark of authoritarianism to foment broad and enduring mistrust in institutions…sowing hopelessness and fear is the fastest way to corrode trust.” She continues, quoting historian Rebecca Solnit, “the best lesson we might take is not just that our brains can rocket from despair to hope but also that hope brings about a surge in imagination and a generosity of vision that unfailingly reminds us of everyone around us, what they need, and why they matter.”
Joy. A surge in imagination, generosity of vision, reminding us of our people. Who we are. What we need. And why we matter.
Debi Lewis introduced me to Ross Gay’s book of essays, Inciting Joy, in which he describes, “what does joy incite?…My hunch is that joy is an ember for…wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unbridled solidarity, and that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And so on.”
My spiritual challenge to each of us this Yom Kippur is to look for ways this year to say yes to Jewish Joy. To prioritize the weddings and the babies and the celebrations, because you know you’d find a way to make it to the funerals. To choose to go into the sanctuary for a bar mitzvah kid you don’t know, and be part of the people -our people- who show up for them. Did you know that in every JRC b’nai mitzvah service, the 4th aliyah to the Torah is for all adult JRC members, which for the very first time includes the bat mitzvah kid, and we need you. You can come up to the bimah even if you’re not invited or dressed up to be with a kid you’ve never met before and show them, I’m here to celebrate you. Being Jewish and being 13 and being willing to embrace and celebrate your identity in public deserves a crowd. Not just for their joy, but for your own.
Don’t delay joy – for being willing to embrace and celebrate your identity can happen at any age.
In the week before Rosh Hashanah, 7 JRC members became Jewish.
These 7 people joined the Adult Brit Mitzvah cohort, along with 18 other JRC Jews to engage and develop an adult relationship with their Jewish identities. They studied, learned in hevruta, and built friendships. They mined their own histories to create spiritual autobiographies. They showed up for services and learned to sing some prayers. They started with all of Jewish history in an hour and half and then spent the next year finding their own voice in it. Some have been JRC members for 30 years. Some are raising Jewish children. Some couldn’t not be Jewish along with the rest of their families this year of all years.
7 people stepped forward and said these powerful words: I am Jewish.
7, as you know, in Jewish tradition, is the number of wholeness and completeness. There are 7 days in the week, including Shabbat for rest and reflection, 7 weeks between freedom from slavery at Passover and revelation of covenant at Mt. Sinai at Shavuot, 7 years in the cycle of the planting of the land and the sabbatical cycle, and 7 times 7 years in the jubilee cycle of release and renewal. There are 7 circles and 7 blessings at a wedding and 7 days of shiva. When we do something 7 times, it is as though we have been blessed with the complete cycle, all the blessings in the world represented in these 7.
Last week, we made 7 new Jews. The whole Jewish world created anew.
When they emerged from the mikvah waters of the pool or of Lake Michigan early in the morning, some with tears, all with smiles: Joy, which now makes up part of their life story, witnessed in each case, either on the beit din or next to them in the lake itself, by other JRC members. An embrace of an intimate call that awakened in them at this moment, to find love in being Jewish.
And just like anyone can choose to confirm their Jewish identity at any age, every one of us can keep seeking nourishment from our Judaism now. Maybe an early morning mikvah in the lake is just what you need too.
This summer at a wellness retreat, the room next to ours was under construction. Each early morning I walked by this sign which read “this location is being restored and renewed, much like you are.” That’s what our Judaism can be – a space for us to be restored and renewed. How might Judaism restore and fill you?
Every Friday night, we sing the words “shiru ladonai, shiru shir hadash” in our Kabbalat Shabbat service. They mean, “sing out to the source a song of renewal.” That renewal might come from prayer, from meditating on something to be grateful for, or it might come from the homemade challah someone made for the oneg that night. One deep teaching I learned from my time at CBST, a gay congregation that spent the decade of the 1990s with funeral after funeral after funeral of its own members from AIDS every week, that Shabbat services could not become another memorial service. We needed to lift up the other parts of Judaism too, and we needed our Judaism to hold us.
Rightfully so, we sometimes gather in grief. But every gathering cannot be a vigil of lament. We need to fill our wells.
Let’s keep asking the question. What lives in Jewish traditions that your soul or heart is seeking this year? There are blessings for everything in Judaism; will you post the joy, and not just the heartbreak?
This is your personalized invitation: Come over. Be with your Jewish community and fill up. Bake recipes out of a Jewish cookbook together, see a play or a movie with fellow Jews and talk about it. Make or look at art. Listen to Jewish music or pull out old songbooks or share a spotify playlist. Use the spiritual technology of Shabbat to take a walk leaving from JRC, or come inside and eat a cookie or sing or write postcards or do nothing but enjoy being Jewish is a place that exists for you. For us. Do it together.
The word for hope in Hebrew is the same word for thread. Tikvah. It is the same word used in our texts when the prophet Job writes, “there is tikvah for a tree, if it is cut down, it will renew itself.”
Despair is not a strategy. Joy is. Hope is. Hope doesn’t erase danger. It doesn’t pretend everything will be ok because we all know it isn’t right now, and it might get worse. As the line in the musical “Suffs” quotes, “Progress is possible; not guaranteed.” But hope gives us permission to dare to imagine that things could be different anyway, that the reason to be Jewish is not because of suffering but because it sustains us, so that when the hard things come, and we know they will, we have a container of meaning to hold us through it. That thread is pulling us to get back in the water of why being Jewish is important to us in the first place. And my hope is, we will find the thread of the happiness that’s remembered and thought about, the happiness that makes up our life story. That we will make the joy.
Ross Gay continues, “My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow -which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow- might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love.”
During these next 24 hours of Yom Kippur reflection about the kind of people we want to be and the sins we want to release, spend some time thinking about your own Jewish nourishment.
How will your Judaism nourish you? Where will you find Jewish joy?
What will be the thread that connects you this year? The poet Denise Levertov writes,
Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven’t tried
the strength of it. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.
Not fear, but a stirring of wonder, she writes. Where will you find the wonder in Judaism this year?
We cannot only notice the thread of Judaism when it is under threat, or when we fear it will disappear. Our Judaism is far too deep a well, waiting for us to dive in, and far too precious for us to let it hang merely by a thread.
I cannot answer the question for you – how you’ll find Joy in your Judaism, or where you’ll feel connection or nourishment, in the same way I can’t tell you what to be grateful for. That’s your own spiritual and Jewish work to do. And good news: it’s Yom Kippur.
But I am here alongside you in partnership to say that I find joy here with you. And I find connection and nourishment too. And I am grateful for you. And I hope this Kol Nidre, this year ahead, that you will take on this challenge with me: to cultivate joy, to strengthen the threads to keep writing our Jewish life stories – not only in the metaphorical Book of Life, but in the Life we live each and every day.
Rabbi Rachel Weiss
Kol Nidre 5785
October 11, 2024